Christoph Schär

Current projects address the role of the water cycle in a changing climate with particular consideration of extreme events (heat waves, floods and droughts). His group is pioneering high-resolution climate models on Alpine to European scales.

Christoph Schär has been Professor at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science since 1992. He heads the Institute's research group on climate and water cycle. Prior to his current appointment, he got a degree in physics and a PhD in atmospheric dynamics from ETH Zurich, and had research positions at Yale University (New Haven, CT) and the University of Washington (Seattle, WA) from 1990-1992.

Christoph Schär is author or co-author of about 170 publications in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. During his career, he has been serving on several national and international committees, among them as member and chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee of ECMWF, as a co-author of the 3rd and 4th and a lead-author of the 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the UNO (IPCC), and as an associate editor of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences and the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. At ETH, he has been chairing the institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science (2001-2006, 2014-2018) and was the founding chairman of the Center for Climate Systems Modeling (C2SM). In Switzerland, he has been working on committees at the climate research / policy interface (ProClim and OcCC), and contributed to the Swiss Climate Scenarios (CH2011, CH2018).