Relevance and Impact

Improving the resilience of our societies in the face of volatile weather and climate change is an urgent priority today and will increase in importance in the decades to come. The climate of the past is by no means sufficient a basis for decisions going forward anymore. Never in history a society has known so much about the processes that shape its future and obtained a wealth of forward-looking weather and climate information (IPCC 2012 and IPCC 2014) – yet pre-emptive (and precautionary) action is not taking place as widespread as it could be. Climate science should take risk management and stakeholder dialogue much more seriously (Weaver et al. 2017; Sutton 2019). While measures exist to adapt to an ever changing environment, public and private decision makers on national, cantonal and local scales need support to identify the most cost-effective instruments, they need to know the potential weather and climate-related damages over the coming decades, to identify measures to mitigate these risks – and to decide whether the benefits will outweigh the costs.

The planned project continues the long-term collaboration of MeteoSwiss with ETH Zurich and CSCS to develop the high-resolution weather and climate prediction models COSMO and ICON on hybrid (graphical processing units, GPUs) architectures – which is in line, e.g., with larger-scale efforts to develop high precision digital models to support European environmental policies in the framework of the Destination Earth initiative (Voosen, 2020). In parallel, the expansion of the open source and open access impact modeling platform CLIMADA to cover hail risk in Switzerland for multiple sectors will allow decision-makers to integrate hail impacts into their decision-support systems. This fits well with the strategy of the Center for Climate Systems Modeling (C2SM), based at ETH Zurich, to add impact modeling as a third pillar to its service provision. Building on experience on automated daily assessments of potential storm damage in collaboration with the Weather and Climate Risks Group, MeteoSwiss considers to use CLIMADA operationally by 2024 in the context of the „Optimierung von Warnung und Alarmierung bei Naturgefahren“ (OWARNA2), as mandated by the federal council in June 2019.

In summary, we envisage the present project to change the hail impact assessment landscape in Switzerland and beyond, underpinning the dialogue with stakeholders with a solid yet versatile platform that can be seamlessly integrated into decision-support systems on the user side, either directly (e.g., for (re-)insurance companies) or indirectly as a service (e.g., for wine producers), both in the context of OWARNA2@MCH (impact- based forecasts at MeteoSwiss, cf. Weyrich et al. 2018, Merz et al. 2020) as well as the (Swiss) National Center for Climate Services (NCCS) for climate impact projections.