MeteoSwiss - Preclim

The reality of a changing climate is expected to affect society at many levels, requiring the development of strategies to effectively manage the risks and chances due to changing climatologic conditions. However, for such strategies to be effective, reliable climate change scenarios are needed so that magnitude and uncertainty of the future climate development can be estimated.

Given these societal needs, the project Preclim aims at improving and updating the existing climate scenarios for Switzerland and the Alpine region on the basis of a new generation of climate models as well as sophisticated statistical methods. The resulting climate change information will be provided in a format which allows their direct use for various applications in sectors such as hydrology, agriculture, infrastructure, tourism and energy.

Methods and data

The climate projections will be based on a new suite of state-of-the-art global climate models as well as high-resolution regional models stemming from the European ENSEMBLES project. The focus will be on the expected climate conditions by mid of this century under the assumption of IPCC Emission Scenario A1B. The individual climate models will thereby be jointly evaluated and their information content combined such that optimum projections are obtained and the model uncertainties are appropriately quantified. Additionally, modern statistical methods (downscaling) will be applied to enhance the spatial and temporal resolution of the climate projections to meet the end users' need.

Decadal forecasts

Between the target period of the PreClim climate scenarios (2030-2050) and the already well-established seasonal forecasts, there is a prediction gap on the time-scale of 1-10 years. While this time-scale is of particular socioeconomic interest since it represents the planning horizon for many economic and political decisions, the field of decadal forecasting is still in its infancy due to the high computational demands. However, recent developments in model technology indicate that decadal forecasting may now start to become feasible to some degree. To shed more light on this upcoming research field, PreClim will also analyze the potential of decadal forecasts for Europe and particularly Switzerland. The required data will be provided from international projects like ENSEMBLES. The long time cooperation with Swiss Re and thus the link to the application side will be continued in this part of the project.