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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
As you saw in the last blogpost, our group is maintaining a high resolution temperature and humidity monitoring network in the city of Zurich. Some of the stations are also located in the district of Zurich West, which is located just north of the railroad tracks running towards the main station. Zurich West is quite […]