News and Events

Where does Switzerland stand in addressing climate change? The latest report from the Swiss Academies of Sciences (SCNAT), in collaboration with the Institute of Geography, provides answers to this question.

The hot and dry European summer of 1540 with its extreme impacts is well known. It marked the culmination of an 11-month drought and of a very dry decade, dwarfing the heat summer of 2003 in terms of anomalies. Few people know that the summer of 1590 was even hotter, but fell into a generally cold an rainy decade. Consequences were much less severe. In a paper in "Scientific Reports", Laura Lipfert analyses these and other hot European summers of the last 600 years and places future extreme summers into the context of past anomalies.

As a climate scientist, Patrick Bigler has developed a measuring tower for urban temperature measurements in Bern. And as a trained metal worker, he builds the tower himself.

(to the Article)

Daily weather reconstruction for Europe are possible for periods more than 200 years back. Using the example of the "heat summer of 1807", Peter Stucki compared nine different approaches - numerical, statistical, machine learning - for daily temperature and pressure reconstructions. The paper is highlighted in "Climate of the Past".

Anja Netzle joined the Climatology Group on 2 February as a junior assistant. She is currently completing her bachelor’s thesis in the UrbanLab of the Urban City Group, where she investigates public perceptions of the Viererfeld area in Bern. Her work at the GIUB will be managing the Colloquium Atmosphere, Climate and Earth observation as well as various administrative tasks and supporting the High Resolution Temperature  Network in Bern, Biel and Thun.

Breathtaking, impressive, frightening glacier photos in the book by Andreas Wipf, Samuel Nussbaumer, Horst Machguth and Heinz Zumbühl: ‘Swiss Glacier Landscapes in Climate Change – A Panoramic Journey Through Time’ (Haupt-Verlag, 240 pages).

The new Swiss climate scenarios CH2025 were presented on Tuesday. Important contributions on extreme events and urban heat were made by the research groups "Climate Impact Research" and "Climatology" of the Institute of Geography.  

The article published in the Bund reports on the work of the Urban Climate Research Group on the increase of tropical nights.

An article by Stefan Brönnimann in Spektrum der Wissenschaft on climate and weather reconstructions also reports on the study led by Christian Pfister on the use of wine quality as a climate indicator.
To the article

Enganged UniBe supports the ‘UrbanLab Viererfeld’ project, which involves various units of the GIUB as well as researchers from the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine and the Physics Institute. Together with the City of Bern, the Engehalde neighbourhood, Neufeld High School and others, the project accompanies and researches the construction of the new neighbourhood from the perspective of the multifaceted interactions between newly emerging residential structures and environmental factors.

At the DACH2025 conference in Bern, Stefan Brönnimann received the Paulus Award of the of the German Meteorological Society for his contributions to the history of meteorology.

Laila Seehausen started on the 15th of March as PhD student in the Climatology Group. She studies the impacts of climate variability and management strategies on cropping systems at the Altiplano in the Central Andes. She finished her studies at the Leibniz University Hannover with a master's degree in meteorology. Afterwards, she worked for four years at the German Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources in water projects in Central Africa in the framework of the German Cooperation. Her work included hydrological modeling and scenario development.

New 3-dimensional climate reconstructions allow studying the variability of the Atlantic-European jet stream back to the 15th century. A study of the climatology group shows that hydroclimatic extremes were often related to excursion in the jet and that recent changes in the jet are within the variability seen over the past 600 years.

This year's prize for the best master's thesis in geosciences goes to Daniela Friebel for her work on thermal sensation in two districts of the city of Bern. It mapped places of well-being and discomfort during summer heat phases from the perspective of the neighbourhood residents. The resulting maps allow unusual insights into the perception of urban space.