weather extremes
Weather Extremes is a permanent 1,485-square-metre exhibition at Klimahaus Bremerhaven that turns climate science into a physical, emotional and highly accessible visitor experience. Designed for families, school groups, teenagers and adults, it explores the growing intensity of heatwaves, floods, storms and other extreme weather events. Its central feature is the Uplift: a 12-metre-wide hydraulic platform that carries up to 40 visitors through three levels of the building during a 12-minute multisensory ride.
The journey begins with playful, hands-on discovery. Visitors can create and examine real tornado vortices using laser visualisation, move through floating fog to uncover information about cloud formation, record their own forecast in a green-screen television studio and watch live weather presentations. A hosted pre-show then introduces climate attribution science using Ed Hawkins’ warming stripes before the group steps onto the Uplift together.
As the platform rotates, tilts and spirals upwards, 360-degree projections, an overhead screen, wind, water spray, fog, surround sound and laser mapping place visitors inside dramatised weather scenarios. They move from drought and wildfire into heavy rainfall, flooding and a developing hurricane. The sequence concludes with a view of Earth from space, shifting the perspective from individual events to the fragility of the planet as a whole. On the final level, the pace becomes quieter and more reflective. Interactive maps, eyewitness accounts, expert testimony and real artefacts connect the spectacle to people living with, studying and responding to extreme weather.
The exhibition’s creative structure is deliberately simple and effective: explore the science, feel its physical power, then understand its human meaning. The Uplift is not merely a simulated ride but an architectural device that genuinely transports visitors between floors, making movement through the building part of the story. Fully accessible to wheelchair users, the experience combines theme-park-scale engineering with museum learning and a final message of agency rather than despair.