A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences
Although the official summer season is far from ending, it is probably safe to say already now that Switzerland is currently experiencing one of the sunniest, driest and hottest summer of the last decade. As published within the MeteoSwiss Climate-Blog article from July 29th 2022, July 2022 is ranking as the fourth warmest July (after […]
Climate change will only be successfully tackled if a drastic reduction in emitted greenhouse gases can be fulfilled. This goal can best be reached by both decarbonizing all energy sectors and reducing the energy demand of our society. To this end, Switzerland aims at rapidly expanding the capacity of green energy production, with a strong […]
Our group had the pleasure to host this years Symposium of the Swiss Society for Meteorology (SGM). Within four sessions, the participants could listen to 11 highly interesting contributions from emeriti, scientists, engineers, meteorologists, and entrepreneurs within the field of historic to modern measurements, and from established to new remote and in-situ measurement techniques. Dr. […]
“How warm is it today?”, you may have asked yourself, before walking out of the door. Indeed, knowing the approximate air temperature will steer many of your decisions: Hobbies, choice of clothing or even comfort-oriented decisions to turn up the heating. As with many other questions in atmospheric physics, the devil lies in the detail. […]
Guest post by our two former Bachelor students Simon Moser and Lucas Spring To better understand the urban heat island effect (UHIE) and to be able to plan urban heat mitigation measures in a more targeted way, high-resolution models of the temperature distribution in cities are needed. An important component to develop and validate such […]
Guest post of our two Bachelor students Soneesh Gill and Manuel Walter The study of urban heat islands becomes more and more important, especially when considering the ongoing climate change. To keep urban regions habitable in the future, city planning measures must be taken. To achieve their greatest benefit, measures such as the greening of […]
For a few months now, our group and our students have been doing field measurements using Partector 2, a portable particulate matter (PM) sensor from naneos particle solutions gmbh. This very nice portable device utilizing induced currents (Fierz et al, 2014) measures the lung-deposited surface area (LDSA, see e.g. the paper of Sager & Castranova, […]
Of course, COVID-19 also affected us, leading to working from home, interruption of routine aircraft turbine emission measurements at SR Technics, or to additional workload linked to remote teaching activities. On a positive note, COVID-19 offered the unique situation of drastic reductions in road as well as air traffic. At Zurich airport, there were days […]
365 days happen to pass extremely quickly, especially during the buzzing university terms. Yet, regular discussions, making sure our plans still fit the main mission to provide significant services to the global community, are of uttermost importance. A yearly group retreat allows us to take some distance from the everyday rush, changing the perspective and […]
Each year, I am teaching around 60-80 students some meteorological basics. The courses include a wrap-up of first year physics, and builds upon this knowledge to introduce some applied notions of thermodynamics and fluid dynamics (see course description here). The main aim of the course is to enable students to understand, categorize and maybe even […]
