Bregje van der Bolt

Bregje van der Bolt is a Ph.D. student, supervised by Egbert van Nes, Marten Scheffer, Appy Sluijs and Tim Lenton. She holds a BSc in liberal arts and sciences from University College Maastricht and an MSc in Environmental Science from Wageningen University. The title of her Ph.D. project is: “Timescales and tipping points in the climate”. The project started in June 2015 and is part of the Netherlands Earth System Science Centre (NESSC).

In view of current climate change, it is important to know whether the climate system has so-called tipping points: thresholds after which the climate system abruptly switches to another state. In order to answer that question, we need a better understanding of the influence of different processes on the behaviour of a system. Bregje aims to determine the influence of timescales of changes in the environmental conditions and response times of climate systems, on the probability of undergoing critical transitions and on our ability to predict an upcoming transition.

e-mail: bregje.vanderbolt@wur.nl