Felix Jäger

Felix Jäger is a climate scientist trained with a focus on atmospheric and land–climate dynamics. After a double Bachelor's  degree in Physics and Philosophy, he completed a Master’s degree in physics at LMU Munich, where he studied idealised baroclinic wave-breaking life cycles under Prof. Dr. Thomas Birner and Dr. Philip Rupp. He complemented this with a broader certificate program on Environmental Studies. His PhD at ETH Zurich with Prof. Dr. Sonia Seneviratne, Dr. Petra Sieber, and Dr. Jonas Schwaab, completed in 2025, focused on interactions between forest cover change and climate change, addressing key uncertainties in large-scale biogeophysical effects of land cover change. In October 2025, he joined the Earth Resilience Science Unit to advance methodologies to assess Earth system stability.

His academic activities include contributions to AGU and EGU General Assemblies (see e.g. Jäger et al., 2024b), as well as the organisation of institute-wide workshops and doctoral researcher networking events. He also has experience in university teaching and science communication, including course design, field teaching, and lectures on climate change and its societal relevance. He has co-supervised multiple Bachelor's and  Master’s theses across the field of land–climate dynamics.

Felix’s research experience spans atmospheric dynamics, land–climate interactions, and Earth system analysis to improve understanding of cross-scale processes in a strongly perturbed Earth system.

He analysed the consistency of afforestation and reforestation-based carbon dioxide removal projections with amplifying climate extremes  across different modelling efforts within the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project framework (Jäger et al., 2024a).

Felix developed the Spectral Climate Signal Separator (SCISSOR) to explore methodological uncertainties in the attribution of non-local climate signals to land use and land cover changes and applied it to simulations of varying complexity (Jäger et al., 2025a). He combined SCISSOR with established methods, which he further developed, to assess the robustness of non-local temperature effects of historical land use and land cover change against internal variability within the Community Earth System Model 2 (Jäger et al., under review).

Currently, he studies methods to analyse Earth system stability and searches for ways to combine state-of-the-art observational and modeling efforts for more reliable and informative assessments.

Under peer review

• Jäger, F., Sieber, P., Simpson, I., Lawrence, P., Lawrence, D, Seneviratne, S. I. (under review). On the
  robustness of modeled non-local temperature effects of historical land use changes, under review.

Published after peer review

• Yao, Y., Sieber, P., Hauser, M., Schwaab, J., Jäger, F., Batibeniz, F., Räty, M., Pongratz, J., Wild, M., Lessa Derci Augustynczik, A., De Hertog, S.J., Griess, V.C., Windisch, M.G., Ge, J., Collalti, A., Di Fulvio, F., Havlik, P., Seneviratne, S.I. (2025). Conversion from coniferous to broadleaved trees can make European forests more climate-effective, Nat Commun, 16, 9536, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-64580-y.
• Jäger, F., Schwaab, J., Bukenberger, M., De Hertog, S.J., and Seneviratne, S. I. (2025). Spectral Decomposition and Signal Separation of Climate Responses to Land Cover Changes, JGR Atmospheres, 130(5), DOI: 10.1029/2024JD042698.
• Jäger, F., Schwaab, J., Quilcaille, Y., Windisch, M., Doelman, J., Frank, S., Gusti, M., Havlik, P., Humpenöoder, F., Lessa Derci Augustynczik, A., Müller, C., Narayan, K.B., Padrón, R.S., Popp, A., van Vuuren, D.,Wögerer, M., Seneviratne, S.I. (2024). Fire weather compromises forestation-reliant climate mitigation pathways, Earth System Dynamics, 15(4), 1055–1071, DOI: 10.5194/esd-15-1055-2024.
• Jäger, F., Rupp, P., and Birner, T. (2023). Robust poleward jet shifts in idealised baroclinic-wave life-cycle experiments with noisy initial conditions, Weather and Climate Dynamics, 4, 49-60, DOI: 10.5194/wcd-4-49-2023.

Other

• Jäger, F., Bloin-Wibe, L., Zhu, D., and Wernli, H. (2024). A More Sustainable Way to Attend Distant
  Science Conferences, Eos, 105, DOI: 10.1029/2024EO240390.