Curriculum Vitae

Valentin Ludwig graduated from High School in Tübingen in 2009. After half a year's volunteer work in Quito, Ecuador he started his academic career by studying Geophysics and Oceanography in Hamburg, where he received his B. Sc. in 2013. He stayed in Hamburg and received his M. Sc. in Integrated Climate System Science in 2016. Between 2012 and 2016, he recieved a scholarship for excellent grades and outstanding social commitment of the german Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Since April 2016, he works as PHD student under supervision of Dr. Gunnar Spreen in the Junior Research Group.

His bachelor's thesis focused on the sea ice concentration retrieval from the low-frequency (1.4 GHz) passive microwave satellite SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity). In his master's thesis, he compared these results to those of another 1.4 GHz satellite, SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive). During a 6-week stay on Svalbard, he acquired field work experience in the course "Remote Sensing of the Cryosphere". In his PhD thesis, he continued working on sea ice concentration retrieval from satellite data. He developed a method to consistently combine different types of measurements (thermal infrared and passive microwave) to get a merged product which benefits from all the advantages of the single datasets and is thus more than the sum of its parts. After his graduation in December 2020, he now works as a postdoc on extending the so-obtained dataset by including visible data in summer.

Apart from the amazing topic of sea ice remote sensing, he is interested in the various implications of our changing climate: What will an ice-free Arctic in summer mean for the local population? How will the Arctic be affected if it is used as a shipping route? How will the large-scale ocean circulation change? What can we as individuals do to influence the future development of our planet? Other than that, he is member of the ArcTrain blogging team: arctrain.de