The ETH-Center for Climate Systems Modeling C2SM – enabling atmospheric science at the Zurich hub

The Center for Climate Systems Modeling (C2SM) is one of ETH’s extradepartmental centres and a joint venture between ETH Zurich, MeteoSwiss, Empa, and WSL. The centre's mission is to provide a technical and scientific platform and a network for its partner institutions to support the development and application of complex models of the weather and climate system. It also supports the analysis and visualisation of climate data, to enable and facilitate collaborations within C2SM’s community and beyond, to exploit synergies among the partner institutions, and to engage in a dialogue with the general public and other stakeholders about climate-​relevant issues. C2SM also acts as the primary entry and interaction point for ETH, for national and international institutions, and for society at large on issues related to climate and climate change. C2SM currently focuses on four areas: 1) Working closely together with the Swiss National Supercomputer Centre (CSCS) and MeteoSwiss, as well as the international partners Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) and Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI), it develops and applies the next generation modelling paradigms in weather and climate. Specifically, in the six-year open ETH project EXCLAIM, C2SM together with its partners is developing an exascale computing and data platform for weather and climate modelling based on the weather forecast and climate model ICON that will be capable of simulating the regional to global ocean-sea-ice-atmosphere-land system on the kilometre scale globally. 2) C2SM works together with the community to maintain and further develop the atmospheric models and their extensions used in the community focusing on technical improvements and adaptations for high-performance computing. 3) Further, C2SM strongly engages in the development of the next generation Swiss climate scenarios in tight collaboration with the National Centre for Climate Services (NCCS) and MeteoSwiss. 4) C2SM also works together with experts in the areas of impact and risk modelling to foster the seamless integration of climate impact sciences into weather and climate models. Last, but no least, C2SM engages in the area of education and outreach by organising the Swiss Climate Summer School at two-yearly intervals and its annual outreach event ETH-Klimarunde, at which the public is informed about current topics of climate change. To support the research at C2SM and to provide these services, C2SM operates with a core budget of about 870 kCHF per year. This supports an executive director, 4.5 full time scientific programmers, and a small communication and event team that together form the C2SM core team.