News Archive

Pioneering study reveals that limiting global warming to 1.5ºC could reduce the global economic costs of climate change by two thirds. If warming continues to 3ºC, global GDP will decrease by up to 10 percent - with the worst impacts in less developed countries.

Greenhouse gas emissions have led to substantial warming globally and in Europe. However, the observed warming in Europe is stronger than typically projected in regional climate models. A new study shows that this is due to insufficient consideration of changes in aerosols in the models and implies higher warming than expected for the future.

Erich Fischer, Nicolas Gruber, Reto Knutti, Sonia Seneviratne and Johan Six are once again among this year's "Highly Cited Researchers".

Daniela Domeisen and Anthony Patt, both professors at ETH Zurich, have been honored with the Dandelion Award 2023. The award recognises professors for their outstanding commitment to promoting entrepreneurship at ETH Zurich and beyond.  

Sonia Seneviratne will represent Switzerland in the Bureau of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC Bureau is responsible for advising the panel on science and work strategy and governs the preparation of the IPCC reports. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is made up of 195 governments and its reports are considered the gold standard of decision-making for climate policy.

Several strategies to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere have been put forward to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. One such strategy is to reduce the intensity of forest management in order to increase the accumulation of carbon in forests. However, a new study published in Science and lead by the Joint Research Center of the European Commission and ETH Zürich shows that, even if forest management were removed altogether, the mitigation potential of this strategy is limited.

Can some insights from weather and climate research be used to improve preparations for a future pandemic? Researchers at ETH Zurich's Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science believe that lessons from four areas of weather and climate research could lead to cross-disciplinary inspiration.

With increasing burdens of micro- and nanoplastics cycling through the atmosphere, the potential of how these particles could affect cloud formation processes is addressed. The atmospheric conditions and plastics properties whereby these particles could act as cloud condensation nuclei or ice nucleating particles in clouds are assessed.

Planting trees has become a trendy carbon offsetting activity. However, large-scale forestation projects may alter the Earth’s energy balance, affecting both global atmospheric and ocean circulation patterns, suggests a modelling study published in Nature Communications.

Heavy precipitation and heat waves are expected to increase in the future. This is one of the findings of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). For the comprehensive analysis, a core team of 234 experts from 66 countries worked up the scientific basis. Among them were Sonia Seneviratne, Erich Fischer and Martin Wild from the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science (IAC) at the Department D-USYS.

Plants evaporate less in dry conditions, which can lead to a warming of the air. Sonia Seneviratne has quantified this phenomenon. Her findings could transform climate modelling.

The temporary breakdown of Earth’s magnetic field 42,000 years ago, in combination with a low point of solar activity (Grand Solar Minimum), sparked major climate shifts that led to global environmental change and mass extinctions, a new international study with participation of ETH scientists suggests. The findings have been published in "Science" on 18 February 2021.

A new simulation study shows that climate change risks significantly altering water temperature, ice cover and mixing of many Swiss lakes. Mid altitude lakes are especially under pressure, running the risk of completely losing ice cover and no longer fully mixing twice per year. Such a change would have fundamental consequences for the functioning of lake ecosystems.

Erich M. Fischer, Nicolas Gruber, Reto Knutti, Sonia Seneviratne und Johan Six are among the «Highly Cited Researchers 2020».  

Because trees absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, some scientists see reforestation as a possible measure to reduce carbon dioxide-induced global warming. However, simulations on the "Piz Daint" supercomputer show that afforestation of grasslands can be counterproductive.

Broad-leaved trees could help to reduce some of the adverse local impacts of climate change. In particular, during hot temperature extremes, broad-leaved trees reduce land-surface temperatures more effectively than needle-leaved trees, according to a study led by ETH Zürich, WSL and MeteoSwiss.

Konrad Steffen, director of WSL and professor for climate and cryosphere at ETH Zurich and EPFL Lausanne, has died following an accident in Greenland this past weekend.  

Sonia Seneviratne, professor for Land-Climate Dynamics at ETH Zurich, receives a Proof of Concept Grant awarded by the European Research Council (ERC). The grant secures her work on the MESMER-X project, which is building on the previous ERC “DROUGHT-HEAT” grant by Seneviratne. The researcher and her group are developing a new Earth System Model (ESM) emulator providing climate extremes projections generally available to scientists, policy-makers and society.

The recent prolonged Siberia heat from January to June 2020 would have been almost impossible without the influence of human-caused climate change. This conclusion was reached by an international team of researchers in cooperation with the Russian P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology and various European weather services. Sonia Seneviratne, Mathias Hauser and Flavio Lehner from ETH Zurich were involved in the study.

Sebastian Schemm has recently been appointed as an Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Circulation at the Institute for Atmosphere and Climate (IAC) at D-USYS.  

Models that pay more attention to the stratosphere, the layer of Earth’s atmosphere around 10km above the surface, provide more accurate forecasts up to a month in advance. This is what a research team found by evaluating the accuracy of models predicting spells of severe cold or mild weather in the mid-northern or southern hemisphere.

Sebastian Schemm (*1984) has been appointed Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Circulation, Dominik Brunner (*1967) is newly elected Adjunct Professor at ETH Zurich. Overall, the ETH Board appointed a total of 19 professors. Three scientits were awarded the title of professor.

By citation analysis, the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Group identifies researchers who have been recognized by the research community around the world for over a decade in the form of exceptionally high citation rates. A total of 18 ETH professors made it onto the "Highly Cited Researchers" list this year. A third of them - 6 in all - belong to the Department of Environmental Systems Science (D-USYS).

Climate change is increasing the number of days of extreme heat and decreasing the number of days of extreme cold in Europe, finds a study published by the Institute for Atmosphere and Climate (IAC) at ETH Zurich.  

The IPCC special report on "Climate Change and Land" was released on August 8. Edouard Davin from the Land-Climate Dynamics group at the Institute for Atmosphere and Climate (IAC) was a lead author of the report and an author of the Summary for Policymakers.

On the International Women’s Day, Equal! has started a new series of portraits of female assistant professors at ETH Zurich. Daniela Domeisen, Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Predictability at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science (IAC), has taken part.

If the air were as clean as it was back in 1960, China’s photovoltaic plants would currently be producing 13% more electricity. This is the conclusion of researchers from D-USYS, based upon a larger series of measurements from China.

Sebastian Schemm, PostDoc in the group of Heini Wernli from the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science (IAC) and visiting professor at the University of Vienna, has received the Young Scientist Award 2019 from the European Meteorological Society (EMS).

FORCeS (Constrained Aerosol Forcing for improved climate projection) is a new research project, which will be carried out within the context of the EU research programme Horizon 2020. It will examine how particles in the air influence the climate. Ulrike Lohmann and her team are also involved, as is the 175 cubic metre HoloBalloon. 

Cirrus clouds are pure ice clouds at high altitudes. They appear as bright white, delicate threads or narrow bands with a silky shimmer, the edges of which are usually frayed by the high winds. A research team led by Zamin Kanji and Claudia Marcolli has investigated how exactly the ice forms in these clouds.

With Big Data, research has access to ever larger volumes of ever more complex data. Researchers of D-USYS investigated under which conditions and for which questions in climate research big data approaches are particularly promising. The biggest potential for big-data elements, the authors argue, lies in socioeconomic research questions, e.g., in climate impact research.

This year's QS World University Ranking confirms ETH Zurich's top ranking in the field of Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, and Agricultural and Forestry Sciences. ETH Zurich as a whole ranks in 7th place worldwide. 

Selenium is a difficult mineral to research, as it has a complex chemistry and is only found in the environment in the tiniest amounts. However, scientists at Eawag and ETH Zurich have now developed new methods of chemical analysis that, when combined with atmospheric models, allow assumptions to be made for the first time on the origins of selenium

Although of social relevance, there are hardly any meteorological studies on extreme seasons to date. Heini Wernli is Professor of Atmospheric Dynamics at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH Zurich. His INTEXseas project aims to reduce this gap, supported by an ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Commission.

Seven researchers from the Department of Environmental Systems Science (D-USYS) are «Highly Cited Researchers 2018». This makes each of them one of about 6,000 scientists worldwide whose publications rank among the top 1% of the most frequently cited papers in their respective fields. Congratulations!

Climate trends in Switzerland show a progressive warming during the last decades. 2018 was the warmest summer period (April to September) since the beginning of the survey in 1864. It even clearly exceeds the values of the «summer of the century» in 2003, as can be seen in a visualization by Christoph Schär, Professor of Climate and Water Cycle at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science (IAC).

Johan Six, Sonia Seneviratne and Ulrike Lohmann are «Highly Cited Researchers 2017».

Reto Knutti, Professor of Climate Physics at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science (IAC), is the new president of ProClim. In this position, he takes over for Heinz Gutscher, who is an emeritus Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Zurich.

An international team of scientists investigates air at altitudes up to 20 km starting from Nepal. Thomas Peter and three other members of the professorship of Atmospheric Chemistry at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science (IAC) are among those present.

The pristine atmosphere of the Southern Ocean is almost the only place on Earth where conditions closely resemble the preindustrial atmosphere. Back in Switzerland, researchers from D-USYS and the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) have started analysing the data collected during the Antarctic Circumpolar Expedition (ACE).  

The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) awarded 42 new SNSF professorships to outstanding young researchers. Three out of four sponsored professorships at ETH have been allocated to projects at the Department of Environmental Systems Science (D-USYS).

Professor emeritus Huw C. Davies has been elected Honorary Member (Fellow) of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics and awarded an honorary doctoral degree by Aberystwyth University.