MeteoSchweiz - EURO4M

In Europe, there is an increasing need for high-resolution climate monitoring products that extend beyond the national boundaries and span across entire geographical entities (e.g. the Mediterranean area, the Alps, the entire continent). Such datasets provide an important basis for a better understanding and prediction of climate change, including the occurrence of extreme events and weather related hazards. However, differences in the national data policies have hampered the exchange of high-resolution climate data and hence the development of transnational datasets.

EURO4M is a FP7 Collaborative Project of the European Union that aims at developing and delivering the best possible gridded climate change time series covering all of Europe. Transnational datasets, user-specific analyses and information bulletins will be derived, which support research, authorities and decision making on climate change and its impacts. MeteoSwiss contributes to EURO4M by focusing on rain and snowfall in the Alps and adjacent lowlands. To this end, it will develop and analyze a gridded dataset of daily precipitation, covering the entire Alpine region and resolving significant heavy precipitation events of the past 40 years.

Methods

The complex topography of the Alpine ridge is responsible for high precipitation variability at short space scales. The accuracy of climate analysis therefore critically depends on the density of measurements. In EURO4M, MeteoSwiss makes an effort to compile all available rain-gauge measurements from national and regional services for the territory from Lower Austria to the Rhone delta and from the Dynaric Alps to Burgundy. At the final stage, the Alpine Precipitation Dataset will encompass data from about 7000 weather stations. A new statistical analysis scheme will be developed, which builds upon statistical relationships between topography and precipitation and inherently quantifies uncertainties. Finally, MeteoSwiss will evaluate precipitation analyses from regional re-analyses and grid products from other sources. The MeteoSwiss working plan for EURO4M builds on earlier research at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH Zurich (Frei & Schär 1998, Schmidli et al. 2002).

Frei C. and C. Schär, 1998: A precipitation climatology of the Alps from high-resolution rain-gauge observations. Int. J. Climatol., 18, 873-900.

Schmidli J., C. Schmutz, C. Frei, H. Wanner and C. Schär, 2002: Mesoscale precipitation in the Alps during the 20th century. Int. J. Climatol., 22, 1049-1074.