A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences
Like much of Europe, Winterthur experienced hot weather during the summer of 2026. During heatwaves, however, nighttime temperatures are just as important as daytime temperatures. When the air stays warm throughout the night, people have fewer opportunities to recover from the heat of the day. To investigate nighttime temperatures in more detail, we measured four […]
In the previous post we got a first glimpse at the hot summer 2026 and the measurement network in Winterthur. Now the season is over and the summer 2026 will be remembered as a season of relentless heat. From early June through the end of August, residents experienced repeated heatwaves, prolonged warm nights, and only […]
In our endeavor to comprehend urban climate and the emergence and impact of heat islands, we have already undertaken several projects, as regular readers of our blog are aware. These include temperature measurements in the cities of Zurich and Winterthur. While these two measurement networks differ in their setup – in Zurich, the measurement stations […]
Whereas Billy Idol enjoyed the hot summer nights in New York City, many urban dwellers nowadays wish for colder urban environments. We at ZAV investigate the urban climate and potential measures to mitigate the increasingly high temperatures within the urban heat island. Zurich’s dense urban measurement network provides an ideal dataset for comparison with and […]
Cities globally seek to improve the quality of living and consequently pay great attention to the effects of new constructions on the surrounding. Furthermore, there is a great demand for evaluating methods to mitigate the urban heat island effect. Exemplarily, the city of Zurich mapped out strategies on how to approach the urban heat problem […]
Our group has been running an uniquely dense temperature and humidity measurement network in the city of Zurich between 2019 and early 2022, as you might remember from our blogpost from 2020. In early 2022, the non-automatically reporting stations were removed from the wild and the automatic ones are still out there gathering useful information […]
“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. […]
Due to climate change, cities will increasingly have to deal with extreme heat events during the summer season. After 2003 and 2015, 2018 was another year with a summer that brought above-average temperatures in Switzerland during which excess mortality was observed (2003: 6.9%, 2015: 5.4%, 2018: 3.4%, source: BAFU, 2019). Therefore, it becomes increasingly important […]
Even if COVID-19 has currently pushed global warming out of the media and thus partly out of our minds, this does not mean that it is no longer a threat. Especially now, with the beginning of the warmest months of the year in the northern hemisphere, many people will be experiencing an ungentle reminder of […]
A Visit to the Urban Climate Simulation Capital I had the pleasure of attending the PALM-Seminar 2020, probably the one which has attracted the largest number of attendees so far. Find out in the following article how it went. In the beginning of February, I was given the opportunity to attend the PALM-Seminar at the […]