March 26, 2026
The illustration highlights emerging off-season heat waves (red circles) outside their typical period.
A team of scientists from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, led by climatologist Ondřej Lhotka, is working on a prestigious grant from the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (GACR) focused on off-season heatwaves in Europe.
Heatwaves are typical for summer season. However, due to global warming, we are now encountering events that have the characteristics of heat waves but occur outside their usual season. “First and foremost, we want to establish a temporal and temperature framework for off-season heat waves across Europe. Our main goal is then to create scenarios of changes in these events for the future—both in the relatively near future, around 2050, and in the more distant future, up to the year 2100,” explains climatologist Ondřej Lhotka.
Thanks to his success in the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (GACR) competition, Ondřej Lhotka secured a three-year grant of 6 milllion CZK (244k EUR) for his research. The project succeeded in a very competitive environment, inasmuch as only 14% of project proposals has been funded. “The evaluation process meets the standards of the most prestigious European provider of basic research funding – the European Research Council (ERC),” stated Professor Milan Jirsa, President of GACR. The research will continue until December 2028.