A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
Almost exactly 4 years ago, we started planning an urban climate measurement network for Zurich together with meteoblue AG as part of an Innosuisse project. If we had known at the time how much work it would take to set up and maintain such a measuring network, we would probably have left it alone. Fortunately, … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
Passersby strolling across Turbinenplatz in Zurich these days, are treated with an unusual sight: A construction made of wood, strings and a metallic ring , hovering a few meters above ground and spraying a fine mist into the air, creating a cloud-like image. It is an installation by the city of Zurich, inteded to bring … Read more
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 … Read more
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. … Read more
“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. … Read more
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 … Read more
