Latsis Symposium 2019

Date: August 21-23, 2019
Venue: ETH Zurich, Switzerland

While the basic scientific concepts of climate change are well established, uncertainties in climate projections have remained very large. Reducing this uncertainty is of paramount importance to better understanding climate change, and to providing more reliable projections of sea-level rise, regional climate change and extreme events. With the advent of emerging supercomputing platforms, there are promising prospects to refine the horizontal resolution of global climate models to 1-2 km, and thereby to explicitly resolve some of the key processes such as convective clouds. Realizing this potential requires enormous efforts and innovative solutions at the interface of computer and climate sciences.

The symposium will focus on scientific and technical challenges related to km-scale global and regional climate modeling. It will bring together scientists from the areas of climate modeling, computer sciences and numerical methods – with the aim to address climate and weather time scales, the water cycle and extreme events, as well as emerging supercomputing platforms and software strategies.

There will be oral and poster sessions, several invited talks on key topics, and multiple opportunities for discussions and networking.

The Main Topics Covered Included

• The development of new HPC strategies in the area of climate modeling
• The exploitation of global and regional climate models at the km-scale resolution
• The redesign of current parameterization scheme
• The handling of the data avalanches produced by kilometer-scale simulations
• The development of new programming frameworks and simulation workflows