Publications related to Terrain

Snowfall deposition in mountainous terrain: a statistical downscaling scheme from high-resolution model data on simulated topographies

One of the primary causes of non-uniform snowfall deposition on the ground in mountainous regions is the preferential deposition of snow, which results from the interaction of near-surface winds with topography and snow particles. However, producing high-r ...

Frontiers Media Sa2024

Intermediate complexity atmospheric modeling in complex terrain: is it right?

Michael Lehning, Dylan Stewart Reynolds, Michael Haugeneder

Dynamic downscaling of atmospheric forcing data to the hectometer resolution has shown increases in accuracy for landsurface models, but at great computational cost. Here we present a validation of a novel intermediate complexity atmospheric model, HICAR, ...

Frontiers Media Sa2024

Urban boundary-layer flows in complex terrain: Dynamic interactions during a hot and dry summer season in Phoenix, Arizona

Aldo Brandi

Anthropogenic modification of natural landscapes to urban environments impacts land-atmosphere interactions in the boundary layer. Ample research has demonstrated the effect of such landscape transitions on development of the urban heat island (UHI), but c ...

Wiley2024

Automation in steep terrain agriculture: an optimal controller to prevent tipping and slipping of tethered robots on slopes

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Max Mirko Polzin

Autonomous robots have the potential to fundamentally transform conventional farming methods, e.g. by enabling economically viable farming of sloped arable land. However, navigation on slopes in harsh conditions is challenging for robots as they must be pr ...

TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD2023

Combining Weather Station Data and Short-Term LiDAR Deployment to Estimate Wind Energy Potential with Machine Learning: A Case Study from the Swiss Alps

Michael Lehning, Wolf Hendrik Huwald, Jérôme François Sylvain Dujardin, Franziska Gerber, Fanny Kristianti

Wind energy potential in complex terrain is still poorly understood and difficult to quantify. With Switzerland’s current efforts to shift to renewable energy resources, it is now becoming even more crucial to investigate the hidden potential of wind energ ...

2023

A Depth-Averaged Material Point Method for Shallow Landslides: Applications to Snow Slab Avalanche Release

Johan Alexandre Philippe Gaume, Lars Kristoffer Uhlen Blatny, Bertil Trottet, Denis Aloyse Joseph Steffen, Louis Marie Cédric Guillet

Shallow landslides pose a significant threat to people and infrastructure. Despite significant progress in the understanding of such phenomena, the evaluation of the size of the landslide release zone, a crucial input for risk assessment, still remains a c ...

AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION2023

Supercell Thunderstorms in the Alpine Region - From Weather Radar Observations to Idealized Modeling

Monika Feldmann

The high-impact nature and increasing occurrence of severe weather phenomena pushes forward research on their occurrence and improving our understanding thereof. Supercell thunderstorms are the focus of much severe convective research, as they represent on ...

EPFL2023

TopoCLIM: rapid topography-based downscaling of regional climate model output in complex terrain v1.1

Michael Lehning

This study describes and evaluates a new downscaling scheme that specifically addresses the need for hillslope-scale atmospheric-forcing time series for modelling the local impact of regional climate change projections on the land surface in complex terrai ...

2022

A Downscaling Intercomparison Study: The Representation of Slope- and Ridge-Scale Processes in Models of Different Complexity

Varun Sharma, Franziska Gerber, Albertus Christiaan Kruyt, Dylan Stewart Reynolds

Spatially distributed meteorological information at the slope scale is relevant for many processes in complex terrain, yet information at this sub-km spatial resolution is difficult to obtain. While downscaling to kilometer resolutions is well described in ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022

Downscaling of Historical Wind Fields over Switzerland Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Anthony Christopher Davison, Ophélia Mireille Anna Miralles

Near-surface wind is difficult to estimate using global numerical weather and climate models, because airflow is strongly modified by underlying topography, especially that of a country such as Switzerland. In this article, we use a statistical approach ba ...

2022

Radar and ground-level measurements of clouds and precipitation collected during the POPE 2020 campaign at Princess Elisabeth Antarctica

Alexis Berne, Alfonso Ferrone

The datasets presented in this article were collected during a four-months measurement campaign at the Belgian research base Princess Elisabeth Antarctica (PEA). The campaign, named PEA Orographic Precipitation Experiment (POPE), was conducted by the Envir ...

2023

Gait-dependent Traversability Estimation on the k-rock2 Robot

Auke Ijspeert, Matthew Alfonso Estrada, Mohammadreza Ebrahimi

Assessing the traversability of rugged terrain is a difficult challenge for legged robots, especially when they implement multiple, distinct gaits. We tackle this problem on the k-rock2 amphibious, sprawling gait robot by training a gait-dependent traversa ...

IEEE2022

Radar processing techniques to study summer snowfall in the Sør Rondane Mountains, Antarctica

Alfonso Ferrone

Snowfall is one of the main positive contributors to the surface mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet. There are several techniques to monitor solid precipitation on the continent. Among them, meteorological radars provide the means to characterize the ...

EPFL2022

How Forward-Scattering Snow and Terrain Change the Alpine Radiation Balance With Application to Solar Panels

Michael Lehning, Annelen Kahl

Rough terrain in mid- and high latitudes is often covered with highly reflective snow, giving rise to a very complex transfer of incident sunlight. In order to simplify the radiative transfer in weather and climate models, snow is generally treated as an i ...

2021

Method for flattening substrates or layers using 3d printing and etching

Niels Quack, Teodoro Graziosi, Marcell Kristof Kiss, Nathanaël Restori

The present invention concerns a layer or substrate flattening method comprising the steps of: - providing a layer or substrate (1) to be flattened; - measuring a topography or surface profile of at least one area (3) of the layer or substrate to be flatte ...

2021

Mapping quality prediction for RTK/PPK-equipped micro-drones operating in complex natural environment

Jan Skaloud, Davide Antonio Cucci, Laurent Valentin Jospin, Emmanuel Pierre Quentin Clédat

Drone mapping with GNSS-assisted photogrammetry is a highly efficient method for surveying small -or medium- sized areas. However, the mapping quality is not intuitively predictable, particularly in complex environments (with steep and cluttered terrain), ...

2020

An Efficient FDTD Method to Calculate Lightning Electromagnetic Fields Over Irregular Terrain Adopting the Moving Computational Domain Technique

Marcos Rubinstein, Mohammad Azadifar, Farhad Rachidi-Haeri, Wenhao Hou, Qilin Zhang

We present an improved finite-difference time domain (FDTD) method based on the moving computational domain technique for the calculation of lightning-generated fields over large-scale irregular terrain. In the improved method, a spatial window moving alon ...

2020

Earth and field observations underpin metapopulation dynamics in complex landscapes: Near-term study on carabids

Andrea Rinaldo, Damiano Pasetto, Francisco Javier Perez Saez, Jonathan Giezendanner

Understanding risks to biodiversity requires predictions of the spatial distribution of species adapting to changing ecosystems and, to that end, Earth observations integrating field surveys prove essential as they provide key numbers for assessing landsca ...

2020

Learning about the vertical structure of radar reflectivity using hydrometeor classes and neural networks in the Swiss Alps

Alexis Berne, Floortje Elisabeth Maria Van den Heuvel, Marco Gabella, Urs Martin Germann

The use of radar for precipitation measurement in mountainous regions is complicated by many factors, especially beam shielding by terrain features, which, for example, reduces the visibility of the shallow precipitation systems during the cold season. Whe ...

2020

On the Efficiency of OpenACC-aided GPU-Based FDTD Approach: Application to Lightning Electromagnetic Fields

Farhad Rachidi-Haeri, Mohammad Azadifar, Hamidreza Karami

An open accelerator (OpenACC)-aided graphics processing unit (GPU)-based finite difference time domain (FDTD) method is presented for the first time for the 3D evaluation of lightning radiated electromagnetic fields along a complex terrain with arbitrary t ...

MDPI2020