Milan Flach PhD student, Member of the research group: Empirical Inference of the Earth System room: C3.013 (tower) phone: +49 3641 576288 email: mflach(at)bgc-jena.mpg.de

Research Interests:

Space-born earth observations offer unprecedented opportunities for detecting changes in land ecosystems. The spatial and temporal resolution is increasing rapidly. Novel algorithms often developed in computer science are awaiting to be transferred to other disciplines and have the potential to reveal novel insights. In particular, extremes are expected to play an increasing role with respect to climate change. My aim is to detect anomalies and extreme events with a recently developed multivariate approach out of a multivariate earth observation data stream and to attribute them to societal or environmental transformations.

Methodological Aspects:

• data driven and unsupervised extraction of information from large data-sets
• multivariate anomaly detection
• dimensionality reduction of multivariate data
• techniques to capture nonlinearities in time series

Current Projects:

PhD project: 'Detecting Extreme Anomalies in Ecosystem Functioning' in cooperation with the Computer Vision Group and Geographic Information Science, FSU Jena. The PhD project is affiliated with the projects BACI - Towards a Biosphere Atmosphere Change Index and the Earth System Data Lab.

Software:

· Julia Package for Multivariate Anomaly Detection: MultivariateAnomalies.jl

Publications

Peer-reviewed:

· Flach, M., Sippel, S., Gans, F., Bastos, A., Brenning, A., Reichstein, M., and Mahecha, M. D. (2018): Contrasting biosphere responses to hydrometeorological extremes: revisiting the 2010 western Russian Heatwave, Biogeosciences, 15, 6067-6085, doi: 10.5194/bg-15-6067-2018.

· Sippel, S., Reichstein, M., Ma, X., Mahecha, M. D., Lange, H., Flach, M., & Frank, D. (2018). Drought, Heat, and the Carbon Cycle: a Review. Current Climate Change Reports, 4(3), 266–286, doi: 10.1007/s40641-018-0103-4.

· Flach, M., Gans, F., Brenning, A., Denzler, J., Reichstein, M., Rodner, E., Bathiany, S., Bodesheim, P., Guanche, Y., Sippel, S., and Mahecha, M. D. (2017): Multivariate anomaly detection for Earth observations: a comparison of algorithms and feature extraction techniques, Earth Syst. Dynam., 8, 677-696, doi: 10.5194/esd-8-677-2017.

· Sippel, S., El-Madany, T. S., Mahecha, M. D., Migliavacca, M., Carrara, A., Flach, M., Kaminski, T., Otto, F. E. L., Thonicke, K., Vossbeck, M., Reichstein, M. (2017). Warm Winter, Wet Spring and an Extreme Response in Ecosystem Functioning on the Iberian Peninsula. In Herring, S. C., Christidis, N., Hoell, A., Kossin, J. P., Schreck III, C. J., and Stott, P. A. (Eds.), Explaining Extreme Events of 2016 from a Climate Perspective. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 98 (12), S80–S85, doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-17-0135.1.

· Sippel, S., Forkel, M., Rammig, A., Thonicke, K., Flach, M., Heimann, M., Otto, F. E. L., Reichstein, M., and Mahecha, M. D. (2017). Contrasting and interacting changes in simulated spring and summer carbon cycle extremes in European ecosystems. Environmental Research Letters. 12 (7), p. 075006. doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/aa7398.

· Sippel, S., Otto, F. E. L., Flach, M., and van Oldenborgh, G. J. (2016). The Role of Anthropogenic Warming in 2015 Centra European Heat Waves. In Herring, S. C., Hoell, A., Hoerling, M. P., Kossin, J. P., Schreck III, C. J., and Stott, P. A. (Eds.), Explaining Extremes of 2015 from a Climate Perspective. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 97 (12), S51–S56, doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-16-0150.1.

· Rodner, E., Barz, B., Guanche, Y., Flach, M., Mahecha, M. D., Bodesheim, P., Reichstein, M., and Denzler, J. (2016): 'Maximally Divergent Intervals for Anomaly Detection'. ICML Workshop on Anomaly Detection (ICML-WS), New York, USA. June 2016. doi:10.17871/BACI_ICML2016_Rodner.

· Flach, M., Lange, H., Foken, T., and Hauhs, M. (2016): 'Recurrence Analysis of Eddy Covariance Fluxes'. In C. L. Webber Jr., C. Ioana, N. Marwan (Eds.), Recurrence Plots and Their Quantifications: Expanding Horizons. 180, 301-319. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-29922-8_16.

Selected Conference & Workshop contributions:

· Flach, M., Sippel, S., Gans, F., Bastos, A., Brenning, A., Reichstein, M., and Mahecha, M. (2018): 'Contrasting biosphere response to climate extremes: revisiting the western Russian Heatwave 2010 and other events.' European Geosciences Union General Assembly, Vienna, Austria. Oral presentation. Vol. 20, EGU2018-17582. April 2018.

· Guanche Garcia, Y., Rodner, E., Flach, M., Sippel, S., Mahecha, M. D., and Denzler, J. (2016). Detecting multivariate biosphere extremes. In A. Banerjee, W. Ding, V. Dy (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Climate Informatics: CI2016. NCAR Technical Note NCAR/TN-529+PROC (pp. 9-12). Boulder: National Center for Atmospheric Research. doi:0.5065/D6K072N6.

· Flach, M., Sippel, S., Bodesheim, P., Brenning, A., Denzler, J., Gans, F., Guanche, Y., Reichstein, M., Rodner, E., and Mahecha, M. (2016): 'Hot Spots of Multivariate Extreme Anomalies in Earth Observations'. American Geosciences Union Fall Meeting, San Francisco, USA. Oral presentation. December 2016. Link.

· Flach, M., Mahecha, M., Gans, F., Rodner, E., Bodesheim, P., Guanche, Y., Brenning, A., Denzler, J., and Reichstein, M. (2016): 'Using Statistical Process Control for Detecting Anomalies in Multivariate Spatiotemporal Earth Observations'. European Geosciences Union General Assembly, Vienna, Austria. Oral presentation. Vol. 18, EGU2016-7948-2. April 2016.

· Lange, H., Flach, M., Foken, T., and Hauhs, M. (2015): 'Recurrence Analysis of Eddy Covariance Fluxes'. European Geosciences Union General Assembly, Vienna, Austria. Oral presentation. Vol. 17, EGU2015-5798-1. April 2015.

Curriculum Vitae

• since 03/2015          PhD student at the International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) for Global Biogeochemical Cycles, Jena, Department of Biogeochemical Integration, Empirical Inference Group. The PhD is in cooperation with the computer vision group and the chair of geoinformatics, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena.
• 01/2015                   Masterthesis on 'Recurrence Analysis of Eddy Covariance Fluxes', Ecological Modelling in Cooperation with Micrometeorology, Bayreuth.
• 03/2014-04/2014     Research stay for managing and analysing plant species data in 19 countries within HerbDivNet, Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, Canada, supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
• 10/2012                   Bachelorthesis on 'Statistical Connections between Leaf Wetness on Coniferous Needles and Environmental Parameters', Atmospheric Chemistry in Cooperation with Micrometeorology, Bayreuth.
• 10/2009 - 01/2015   Studying Geoecology at the University of Bayreuth.