Sonia Seneviratne awarded ERC Proof of Concept Grant
- D-USYS
- Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science
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.
Climate extremes count among the most impactful consequences of climate change, also under low-emissions scenarios consistent with the aims of the Paris agreement. However, they are not factored in the derivation of emissions scenarios informing international policy options in reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In the MESMER-X project, Sonia Seneviratne and her group will address this shortcoming by developing an operational Earth System Model (ESM) emulator providing climate extremes projections under different emissions and land use scenarios at negligible computational cost. This will allow for the first time a full interactive coupling between the existing Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) and climate scenarios. The new emulator will be made open source and broadly available to scientists, policy-makers and society.
Enabling transfer to society
ERC Proof of Concept (PoC) Grants provide top-up funding to researchers who wish to explore the societal or commercial potential of their results. Worth 150,000 EUR each, they are part of the EU's research and innovation programme, Horizon 2020. In the latest founding round, a total of 55 grants were awarded, only two of them to researchers from Switzerland.
Sonia Seneviratne also held a consolidator grant of the European Research Council from 2014 to 2019. She was an author on several IPCC reports and lead author of the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C global warming. Since 2018, she is a coordinating lead author of the 6th assessment report of the IPCC.