Christoph Schär receives Vilhelm Bjerknes Medal 2023

"During his thirty-five years of research, Christoph Schär has made fundamental contributions to mountain meteorology, regional climate change, climate modeling, hydrological extremes, and geophysical fluid dynamics," the EGU press release states. Christoph Schär has been Professor of Climate and Water Cycle at ETH Zurich since 1992.

A pioneer of weather extremes

The climate scientist was among the first to tackle the important problem of how precipitation extremes vary with climate. His 2001 paper with Christoph Frei established a methodology for distinguishing trends from noise in extreme events. It has continued to provide a strong scientific influence in climate trend detection, especially of precipitation extremes.

New understanding of 2003 heat wave

His 2004 landmark paper on the European summer heat wave of 2003 has become a classic. Schär showed that the spectacular heat wave that affected Western Europe in 2003 was more easily explained by assuming that the range of variability in temperatures also increases as the climate warms, and his group then showed that temperature variance does increase in future climate projections using climate models.

Kilometer-scale resolution

In recent years, Schär has been pushing the boundaries of climate modelling by descending to the kilometer-scale resolution. This capability was made possible by large increases in computational power through innovative code migration to graphics processing units. He spearheaded this pioneering research by teaming up with the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) and MeteoSwiss, which has produced one of the first global climate baseline simulations at this scale. Christoph Schär's continuing efforts to assess the performance of regional climate models with respect to precipitation processes have provided the scientific metrics for model development.