Alpine3D simulations of future climate scenarios CH2014

Overview The CH2014-Impacts initiative is a concerted national effort to describe impacts of climate change in Switzerland quantitatively, drawing on the scientific resources available in Switzerland today. The initiative links the recently developed Swiss Climate Change Scenarios CH2011 with an evolving base of quantitative impact models. The use of a common climate data set across disciplines and research groups sets a high standard of consistency and comparability of results. Impact studies explore the wide range of climatic changes in temperature and precipitation projected in CH2011 for the 21st century, which vary with the assumed global level of greenhouse gases, the time horizon, the underlying climate model, and the geographical region within Switzerland. The differences among climate projections are considered using three greenhouse gas scenarios, three future time periods in the 21st century, and three climate uncertainty levels (Figure 1). Impacts are shown with respect to the reference period 1980-2009 of CH2011, and add to any impacts that have already emerged as a result of earlier climate change. Experimental Setup Future snow cover changes are simulated with the p