Report Harkens Climate Change in Switzerland

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It is getting warmer in Switzerland and dryer in summer, and climate change will also affect the frequency and character of extreme events. In this interview, climate scientist Christoph Schär discusses the current climate scenarios in Switzerland as presented in a recent report at ETH Zurich.

Doubling the resolution results in an eight-fold increase in computing time. That’s why high-resolution simulations are very expensive and laborious. However, an almost even greater problem than the increasing computing time is the amount of data generated during the process. Our own climate simulation took 20 weeks on the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) computer, at that time the fastest in Switzerland, and produced 9.5 terabytes of data. We need to keep this data available for at least five years because it is used and needed by various different groups. Data storage has become an enormous cost driver and is a big burden on these projects’ budgets.

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