Publications related to Surface weather analysis

Turbulence and Heat exchange in the Near-Surface Boundary Layer over Patchy Snow

The atmospheric layer adjacent to the earth's surface is of crucial importance for weather models due to the exchange of energy between the surface and the atmosphere. This exchange is dependent on the various surface properties and influences the state of ...

EPFL2024

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

Michael Lehning

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

Influence of sun cups on surface albedo of wet Alpine snowpack

Michael Lehning, Mathias Thierry Pierre Bavay, Francesca Carletti

In high elevation Alpine areas, characterised by high snow accumulation and radiation-driven melt processes, the formation of peculiar ablation features called sun cups can be observed. Sun cups likely influence the energy and mass balance of the wet snowp ...

2024

Brown carbon absorption in the Mediterranean basin from local and long-range transported biomass burning air masses

Athanasios Nenes

This study examines the impact of light absorption from biomass burning (BB) brown carbon (BrC) in the Mediterranean basin from local and distant fire incidents during a typical fire season in August 2019 and under severe fire activity in August 2021. The ...

Elsevier2023

Natural slicks on Lake Geneva: From small-scale effects to large-scale formation and distribution

Mehrshad Foroughan

Low wind speeds (< 4 m/s) are ubiquitous in many water bodies, yet the physical processes occurring at the air-water interface in this range are poorly understood. A notable example is smooth patches on the water surface, known as natural slicks, formed wh ...

EPFL2023

Assessing sublimation during snow transport and sublimation effects on the isotopic composition of water vapor

Armin Sigmund

Sublimation influences the water storage in snow covers and glaciers, which is important for water use and projections of the sea level rise. Yet, it is challenging to quantify sublimation for large areas or in conditions of snow transport. In-situ measure ...

EPFL2023

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

Reinforcement Learning for Outdoor Balloon Navigation: A Successful Controller for an Autonomous Balloon

Mirko Kovac, Simon Jeger

Autonomous ballooning allows for energy-efficient long-range missions but introduces significant challenges for planning and control algorithms, due to their single degree of actuation: vertical rate control through either buoyancy or vertical thrust. Late ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2024

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

Wind‐Induced Hypolimnetic Upwelling Between the Multi‐Depth Basins of Lake Geneva During Winter: An Overlooked Deepwater Renewal Mechanism?

David Andrew Barry, Ulrich Lemmin, Rafael Sebastian Reiss

Combining field observations, 3D hydrodynamic modeling, and particle tracking, we investigated wind-induced interbasin exchange between the Petit Lac (PL) (depth 75 m) and Grand Lac (GL) (depth 309 m) basins of Lake Geneva in early winter. Following a stro ...

2022

Influence of Microplastics on Microbial Structure, Function, and Mechanical Properties of Stream Periphyton

Kristin Schirmer, Ahmed Tlili, Renata Behra

Periphyton is a freshwater biofilm composed of prokaryotic and eukaryotic communities that occupy rocks and sediments, forming the base of the food web and playing a key role in nutrient cycling. Given the large surface that periphyton comprises, it may al ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022

Considering snow depositions and transport mechanisms in meteorological analysis of predicting snow loads on buildings

Michael Lehning, Borui Zhang, Qingwen Zhang

The meteorological conditions determine snow evolutions on and around buildings. Those climatic impacts have been independently considered in the current design codes of buildings, namely the wind pressure and the snow load. But snow load estimates are onl ...

ELSEVIER2022

A Novel Method to Quantify Near-Surface Boundary-Layer Dynamics at Ultra-High Spatio-Temporal Resolution

Michael Lehning, Dylan Stewart Reynolds, Tobias Jonas, Michael Haugeneder

The lateral transport of heat above abrupt (sub-)metre-scale steps in land surface temperature influences the local surface energy balance. We present a novel experimental method to investigate the stratification and dynamics of the near-surface atmospheri ...

SPRINGER2023

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 Characterisation of Alpine Mesocyclone Occurrence

Alexis Berne, Marco Gabella, Monika Feldmann, Urs Martin Germann

This work presents a characterisation of mesocyclone occurrence and frequency in the Alpine region, as observed from the Swiss operational radar network; 5 years of radar data are processed with a thunderstorm detection and tracking algorithm and subsequen ...

2021

Dynamics of wind-induced coastal upwelling and interbasin exchange in Lake Geneva during winter: Implications for deepwater renewal

Rafael Sebastian Reiss

Water quality in lakes is closely linked to hydrodynamics and often dominated by stratification, limiting the exchange between the epi- and hypolimnion. Thus, the vertical redistribution of biogeochemical tracers such as dissolved oxygen and nutrients by c ...

EPFL2021

DepthInSpace: Exploitation and Fusion of Multiple Video Frames for Structured-Light Depth Estimation

François Fleuret, Camilla Carta

We present DepthInSpace, a self-supervised deep-learning method for depth estimation using a structured-light camera. The design of this method is motivated by the commercial use case of embedded depth sensors in nowadays smartphones. We first propose to u ...

IEEE2021

Synoptic conditions and atmospheric moisture pathways associated with virga and precipitation over coastal Adelie Land in Antarctica

Alexis Berne, Etienne Gabriel Henri Vignon, Nicolas Jean François Jullien

Precipitation falling over the coastal regions of Antarctica often experiences low-level sublimation within the dry katabatic layer. The amount of water that reaches the ground surface is thereby considerably reduced. This paper investigates the synoptic c ...

2020

Microphysics and dynamics of snowfall associated with a warm conveyor belt over Korea

Alexis Berne, Josué Etienne Gehring, Nikola Besic, Etienne Gabriel Henri Vignon, Nicolas Jean François Jullien

On 28 February 2018, 57mm of precipitation associated with a warm conveyor belt (WCB) fell within 21 h over South Korea. To investigate how the large-scale circulation influenced the microphysics of this intense precipitation event, we used radar measureme ...

Copernicus Publications2020

Meridional and vertical variations of the water vapour isotopic composition in the marine boundary layer over the Atlantic and Southern Ocean

Julia Schmale, Sebastian Johannes Heinz-Josef Landwehr

Stable water isotopologues (SWIs) are useful tracers of moist diabatic processes in the atmospheric water cycle. They provide a framework to analyse moist processes on a range of timescales from large-scale moisture transport to cloud formation, precipitat ...

Copernicus GmbH2020