C2SM Newsletter vol. 22

Swiss Climate Scenarios CH2018
The CH2018 project, in which new climate change scenarios for Switzerland are currently being developed, is entering its production phase. First preliminary results regarding changes in seasonal means, extremes, and climate indices based on the state-of-the-art CORDEX simulations over Europe are to be expected in the upcoming months. CH2018 involves the C2SM partners MeteoSwiss and ETH as well as the University of Bern. The scenarios are planned to be released in 2018. To ensure the applicability of the scenarios for a broad user community, a sounding board with participants from different sectors has been established. A first meeting with the sounding board discussing the general plans of CH2018 has recently taken place.

Changes in the project management of CH2018: Kuno Strassmann will take over the project coordination at ETH side starting in October 2016. He succeeds Elias Zubler, who joins MeteoSwiss at the beginning of November. Further, Curdin Spirig joined the project as data manager and analyst in mid-September. We wish Kuno, Curdin and Elias a good start in their new positions!

Paper CH2018: Testing the quantile mapping approach for bias correcting and downscaling climate model output over the Swiss territory
A recent publication by Martin Ivanov and C2SM member external page Sven Kotlarski explores the suitability of quantile mapping (QM) as climate model bias correction and downscaling technique over the complex Swiss terrain. Originating from the Swiss ELAPSE project (Enhancing local and regional climate change projections for Switzerland) the study finds a satisfying performance of a large number of QM implementations in both a historical cross validation and a future pseudo reality setting, and suggests a further exploitation of this technique. Indeed, QM is foreseen to be used as the main statistical downscaling method in the upcoming CH2018 climate scenarios.
Ivanov, M. A. and Kotlarski, S., 2016: Assessing distribution-based climate model bias correction methods over an alpine domain: added value and limitations. Int. J. Climatol., external page doi:10.1002/joc.4870.

New climate science webcasts: building the future and more
Oliver Stebler, part of Reto Knutti's Climate Physics Group at ETH, helps to communicate climate science in his science webcasts ("Werkstattgespräche"), where he interviews leading experts in climate research and climate related practice and industry.  His most recent webcasts include:  1: external page "Die Zukunft bauen" (Gerhard Schmitt) about future cities, urbanisation and future challenges related to climate change.  It also introduces the Singapore-ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability;  2: external page "Visionär und Macher" where science meets practice, and climate
 scientist, Reto Knutti, debates with energy expert, Anton Gunzinger;  3: external page "Schweizer Gemüse und Espresso" (various guests): The best-of from the last 15 webcasts.  More climate science webcasts (in German) can be found on the Climate Physics Group's Werkstattgespräche page, or Oliver Stebler's page for climate science communication tools and multimedia productions.  

MAIOLICA-2: Global methane variability in a changing climate
The MAIOLICA-2 project, funded within the ETH Competence Center Environment and Sustainability (CCES), led into its final phase with the successful PhD defense of Ancelin Coulon (group of T. Peter, ETH) in May 2016.  During the past 4 years, partners from C2SM, Empa, ETH and WSL combined process-oriented emission and atmospheric modeling in an unprecedented way to investigate the drivers of the variability of atmospheric methane growth rates and to provide improved data sets for anthropogenic and wetland emission fluxes for the past. Estimates of future permafrost extents and methane emissions from wetlands under different climate scenarios have also been developed, e.g. as input for climate models.  More on the project and final data products (available soon) can be found on the website.

Project: AWE-GEN-2d: a new high spatial and temporal resolution stochastic weather generator
A new weather generator, AWE-GEN-2d (Advanced WEather GENerator for 2-Dimensional grid) was developed (as part of SCCER-SoE). It combines physical and stochastic approaches to simulate meteorological variables at high space-time resolution, such as 2x2 km and 5’ for precipitation and 100x100 m and 1h for other variables (e.g. temperature). The model is rather parsimonious in terms of computational demand and allows fast and efficient generation of multiple stochastic realizations. The model is particularly suitable for all applications where exploring internal climatic variability at multiple spatial and temporal scales is fundamental and can be reparametrized to downscale climate scenarios.
Project members: Nadav Peleg, Simone Fatichi and Paolo Burlando, Institute of Environmental Engineering, ETH.  For more information, contact Nadav Peleg.