Climate Services

Journal: Climate Services

Publisher

Elsevier

ISSN

2405-8807

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Publications 1 - 10 of 10

Projected changes in European hail damage risk to buildings: Insights from 3 °C Pseudo Global Warming simulations with a km-scale regional climate model
Schmid , Timo; Gebhart , Valentin; Bresch , David N. (2026)
Climate Services
Severe hailstorms are among the most destructive weather phenomena in Europe, with the recent hail seasons of 2022 and 2023 both causing record losses above 5 billion euros. This highlights the importance of assessing hail risk in a warming climate. We approach this question by leveraging 11-year convection-resolving climate simulations using the COSMO model with the hail growth module HAILCAST. Comparing a 3 °C warming scenario to present-day simulations, we observe a generally increasing trend in expected hail damage to buildings, with a 42% increase over the calibration region in Switzerland and pronounced spatial variability across Europe. Assuming a building vulnerability as calibrated over Switzerland, 24 of 28 countries show an increasing potential for hail damage, despite only 11 with increasing overall hail frequency. Given the concentration of hail damages into few events with limited spatial extent, we observe a large variability in modelled hail damage based on sampling uncertainty within the 11-year simulations, which locally mostly exceeds the change signal. Larger spatial aggregation increases the confidence in the climate change signal, with the overall damage potential over Europe increasing by 25%–42% in the 3 °C warming scenario. On top of the change signal, we provide a spatially resampled hail event set for explicit risk assessments and a new technique to calibrate impact functions for climate simulations to observed data.
Who is ‘the user’ of climate services? Unpacking the use of national climate scenarios in Switzerland beyond sectors, numeracy and the research–practice binary
Skelton, Maurice; Fischer, Andreas M.; Liniger, Mark A.; et al. (2019)
Climate Services
By whom are national climate scenarios taken up, and which products are used? Despite numerous (national) climate scenarios being published by countries across the globe, studies of their actual uptake and application remain low. Analysing a survey and group interviews on the ways the Swiss climate scenarios CH2011 have been actually used by the Swiss adaptation community, we encoded the emerging differences in a new typology of observers, sailors, and divers. Taking an iceberg as a metaphor for climate scenarios, most respondents were sailors, accessing only key findings above the waterline (i.e., summary brochures). However, the vast majority of climate scenario data remains below the surface (i.e., downscaled climate model data), accessible only to the quarter of respondents labelled divers. Lastly, another quarter are observers, interested in the iceberg from afar, but without applying the climate information directly to their work. By describing three ways of using climate scenarios, we aim to clarify the often vague notion of ‘user’ circulating prominently in discussions around climate services and knowledge co-production. In addition, our results question the adequacy of simplifying climate scenario use by a user’s easily observable characteristics – such as being a researcher or practitioner, by sector or by numeracy. Our typology thus highlights the diversity of use(r)s within sectors or academia, but is also able to characterise various similarities of use(r)s between sectors, researchers and practitioners. Our findings assist in more nuanced and informed discussions of how ‘users’ are imagined and characterised in future developments of usable climate services.
Twinning SENAMHI and MeteoSwiss to co-develop climate services for the agricultural sector in Peru
Gubler, Stefanie; Rossa, Andrea; Avalos, Grinia; et al. (2020)
Climate Services
The development and dissemination of weather and climate information is crucial to improve people’s resilience and adaptability to climate variability and change. The impacts of climate variability and change are generally stronger for disadvantaged population groups due to their limited adaptive and coping capacities. For instance, smallholder farmers living in remote areas such as the southern Peruvian Andes suffer strongly from adverse weather and climatic events such as droughts or frost. The project Climandes aimed at providing high-quality climate services in support of the agricultural sector in southern Peru by implementing the guidelines of the Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS). In Climandes, a two-fold challenge was tackled: the co-development of climate services by building up a continuous dialogue between the information provider (in this case the Peruvian national meteorological and hydrological service (NMHS)) and potential users; and the production of climate services through international cooperation. To this end, the NMHSs of Peru (SENAMHI) and Switzerland (MeteoSwiss) worked closely together to tackle issues ranging from the treatment of climate data to ensure the provision of reliable information to establishing continuous interaction with different user groups. In this paper, we postulate that this approach of close collaboration, the so-called twinning of the two NMHSs, was key for the projects’ success and contributed to strengthening the Peruvian NMHS institutionally and procedurally. This project overview guides its reader through the approach, main achievements, and conclusions regarding successes and challenges of the project, and reflects on some potential improvements for future initiatives.
Widening the common space to reduce the gap between climate science and decision-making in industry
Fischer, Luise J.; Wernli, Heini; Bresch, David N. (2021)
Climate Services
Climate change impacts lead to risks for natural and human systems. Climate sensitive decision-making in companies is vital to addressing the urgent need for making societies resilient to climate change and entailed risks. Providing and using state-of-the-art scientific knowledge in decision-making, an integral aspect of climate services, poses great challenges for climate scientists and decision-makers. This article aims to contribute to more informed decision-making processes in climate adaptation by addressing the question “How can climate scientists practically implement a transdisciplinary (TD) collaboration with an industry partner to reduce the gap between climate science and decision-making in industry?”. We present an engagement framework that provides guidance to address this question. This framework conceptualizes the engagement using two spheres of interests offering the opportunity to explore and widen their overlap as a common space. We present a case study where we apply this framework to a TD collaboration for climate service provision with a Swiss hydropower industry stakeholder; leading to four practical recommendations for effectively using the proposed framework: (1) Secure an anchor person at management level of the decision-maker entity, (2) Be prepared to invest time into triggering and maintaining active engagement by all collaborators, (3) From the start, communicate the open nature of insights and solutions from the engagement process, (4) Be aware that you are working in a field of tension. The presented engagement framework and practical recommendations are particularly beneficial for climate scientists that are not yet familiar with TD collaborations and enables co-development of bespoke climate services.
Sub-seasonal to decadal predictions in support of climate services
Osman, Marisol; Domeisen, Daniela; Robertson, Andrew W.; et al. (2023)
Climate Services
Climate Scenarios for Switzerland CH2018 – Approach and Implications
Fischer, Andreas M.; Strassmann, Kuno M.; Croci Maspoli, Mischa; et al. (2022)
Climate Services
To make sound decisions in the face of climate change, government agencies, policymakers and private stakeholders require suitable climate information on local to regional scales. In Switzerland, the development of climate change scenarios is strongly linked to the climate adaptation strategy of the Confederation. The current climate scenarios for Switzerland CH2018 - released in form of six user-oriented products - were the result of an intensive collaboration between academia and administration under the umbrella of the National Centre for Climate Services (NCCS), accounting for user needs and stakeholder dialogues from the beginning. A rigorous scientific concept ensured consistency throughout the various analysis steps of the EURO-CORDEX projections and a common procedure on how to extract robust results and deal with associated uncertainties. The main results show that Switzerland's climate will face dry summers, heavy precipitation, more hot days and snow-scarce winters. Approximately half of these changes could be alleviated by mid-century through strong global mitigation efforts. A comprehensive communication concept ensured that the results were rolled out and distilled in specific user-oriented communication measures to increase their uptake and to make them actionable. A narrative approach with four fictitious persons was used to communicate the key messages to the general public. Three years after the release, the climate scenarios have proven to be an indispensable information basis for users in climate adaptation and for downstream applications. Potential for extensions and updates has been identified since then and will shape the concept and planning of the next scenario generation in Switzerland.
Urban multi-model climate projections of intense heat in Switzerland
Burgstall, Annkatrin; Kotlarski, Sven; Casanueva, Ana; et al. (2021)
Climate Services
This paper introduces a straightforward approach to generate multi-model climate projections of intense urban heat, based on an ensemble of state-of-the-art global and regional climate model simulations from EURO-CORDEX. The employed technique entails the empirical-statistical downscaling method quantile mapping (QM), which is applied in two different settings, first for bias correction and downscaling of raw climate model data to rural stations with long-term measurements and second for spatial transfer of bias-corrected and downscaled climate model data to the respective urban target site. The resulting products are daily minimum and maximum temperatures at five urban sites in Switzerland until the end of the 21st century under three emission scenarios (RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP8.5). We test the second-step QM approach in an extensive evaluation framework, using long-term observational data of two exemplary weather stations in Zurich. Results indicate remarkably good skill of QM in present-day climate. Comparing the generated urban climate projections with existing climate scenarios of adjacent rural sites allows us to represent the urban heat island (UHI) effect in future temperature-based heat indices, namely tropical nights, summer days and hot days. Urban areas will be more strongly affected by rising temperatures than rural sites in terms of fixed threshold exceedances, especially during nighttime. Projections for the end of the century for Zurich, for instance, suggest more than double the number of tropical nights (Tmin above 20 °C) at the urban site (45 nights per year, multi-model median) compared to the rural counterpart (20 nights) under RCP8.5.
CH2018 - National climate scenarios for Switzerland: How to construct consistent multi-model projections from ensembles of opportunity
Sørland, Silje L.; Fischer, Andreas M.; Kotlarski, Sven; et al. (2020)
Climate Services
The latest Swiss Climate Scenarios (CH2018), released in November 2018, consist of several datasets derived through various methods that provide robust and relevant information on climate change in Switzerland. The scenarios build upon the regional climate model projections for Europe produced through the internationally coordinated downscaling effort EURO-CORDEX. The simulations from EURO-CORDEX consist of simulations at two spatial horizontal resolutions, several global climate models, and three different emission scenarios. Even with this unique dataset of regional climate scenarios, a number of practical challenges regarding a consistent interpretation of the model ensemble arise. Here we present the methodological chain employed in CH2018 in order to generate a multi-model ensemble that is consistent across scenarios and is used as a basis for deriving the CH2018 products. The different steps involve a thorough evaluation of the full EURO-CORDEX model ensemble, the removal of doubtful and potentially erroneous simulations, a time-shift approach to account for an equal number of simulations for each emission scenario, and the multi-model combination of simulations with different spatial resolutions. Each component of this cascade of processing steps is associated with an uncertainty that eventually contributes to the overall scientific uncertainty of the derived scenario products. We present a comparison and an assessment of the uncertainties from these individual effects and relate them to probabilistic projections. It is shown that the CH2018 scenarios are generally supported by the results from other sources. Thus, the CH2018 scenarios currently provide the best available dataset of future climate change estimates in Switzerland.
Evaluating the added value of the new Swiss climate scenarios for hydrology: An example from the Thur catchment
Rössler, Ole; Kotlarski, Sven; Fischer, Andreas M.; et al. (2019)
Climate Services
The availability of new climate greenhouse gas scenario data often prompts the question in what respect the new data provide added value with respect to previous versions and whether or not impact models have to be rerun with the new climatic forcing. This question is the case not only for updated sets of underlying climate model ensembles but also for changes in the applied postprocessing method, such as in the upcoming new climate change projection suite CH2018. The new local projection data are no longer post-processed based on the delta change approach but using quantile mapping. Here, we evaluate the added value of new climate projections from a hydrological perspective. We propose an evaluation scheme that comprises both reference and greenhouse gas scenario periods, average values on different temporal aggregation levels, as well as extreme-related multiday indices. For a test catchment (Thur, pre-alpine, 1700 km2) we show that the question about an added value, strongly depends on the variable and aspect (average and extreme) of interest. In many cases, basic hydrological characteristics are similarly represented when employing different climate model postprocessing techniques. However, we found differences in the climate change signal already for mean monthly runoff values and even more for several extreme-related indices. Some of them reveal very similar change signals, while the indices related to the intensity/volume of the extremes can strongly diverge. We argue that the comprehensive comparative analysis presented here is transferable and provides useful guidance for the assessment an added value, especially for climate data providers and impact modellers.
Building design in a changing climate – Future Swiss reference years for building simulations
Wehrli, Kathrin; Sidler, Franz; Gubler, Stefanie; et al. (2024)
Climate Services
With global climate change, temperatures in Switzerland are projected to rise in the coming decades, according to the national climate scenarios CH2018. Associated with the mean temperature increase, heatwaves are expected to become longer, more frequent, and more intense. The changing climate will affect the indoor climate as well as heating and cooling needs. In building design, these climatic changes have to be planned for today in order to ensure a comfortable indoor climate in the future. In collaboration with practitioners, a reference climate data set for the future is created that specifically targets building designers and engineers. The data set consists of hourly weather data of one-year length based on the Swiss climate change scenarios CH2018. These future reference years are representative of two time periods in the future: one around 2030 and one around 2060. Climate change uncertainty is considered by using two emission scenarios (RCP2.6 and RCP8.5). Reference data for the future is provided not only for a typical year (called Design Reference Year, or DRY) but also for an above-average warm summer. The data is available at the sites of 45 measurement stations across Switzerland, including four stations inside major cities to take the urban heat island effect into account. The generated climate data set is applied to a building model to provide an application example. The results point out that the cooling needs will substantially increase, which is why an adaptation of the building design to the changing climate is vital.

Publications 1 - 10 of 10

Journal: Climate Services

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