The title of the 2017 Swiss Climate Summer School, which was organised by ETH Zurich, was High-Resolution Climate: Observations, Models, and Projections. It took place in Conference and Cultural Center Monte Verità in the town of Ascona, in the south of Switzerland. With approximately 65 posters being presented, 4 workshops, and 11 key note speakers, there was a large variety of expertise present at the summer school.
Lectures were not only limited to high resolution observations, models and projections. Additional lectures on extreme events and on the hardware being used to run the simulations and analyse the observations also took place. This allowed people working on different research topics to discuss their research interests. The summer school also allowed for discussions on the importance of connecting models to observations and the importance of understanding the hardware that you are using as part of your research.
To finish off the summer school a panel was formed by a number of the keynote speakers where participants of the summer school got the opportunity to ask questions about some of the topics that arose during the course of the week.
We also had the opportunity to take part in a work group. There were 4 different working groups,  which focused on a attempting to answer different questions. Each participant of the summer school joined a working group depending on the question that they wanted to help answer. The working group I joined was focused on answering the question “How can we validate models”. While being a part of this working group I was able to get insight into the different methods my fellow participants use to validate their model simulations. On the last day each of the working groups presented their findings, and it allowed everyone to have a more detailed discussion.
The poster I presented at the summer school was based on the work that I have completed, so far, as part of my PhD project. This allowed me to discuss my research with some of my fellow participants and get feedback from some of the experts that were in attendence. I found it particularly interesting to get an insight into some of the research that is taking place in the climate field.

Stephanie Reilly
PhD Student

Institute for Geophysics and Meteorology

PhD Project: "Fast Response of Boundary Layer Clouds to Climate Change"

Presentation at Summer School: Fine-Scale Simulations of Observed NARVAL Cases for Investigating Low Level Cloud Responses to Climate Change. (Poster)