Publications related to Topography

At what spatial scale does natural selection operate? Using multiscale frameworks to calibrate the effects of environmental factors across landscape continuums

Patterns in nature arise from processes interacting across a continuum of spatial scales, where new relationships emerge at each level of investigation. These patterns are nested features encompassing fine-scale local patterns, such as topography and geolo ...

EPFL2024

Impact of Topography on Rural Cycling Patterns: Case Study of Bugesera District, Rwanda

Jérôme Chenal, Akuto Akpedze Konou, Baraka Jean-Claude Munyaka, Rim Mrani

Rural mobility in Africa is an under-researched issue. Rural communities have often suffered from reduced mobility that has hampered their access to essential services and facilities such as education, health care, food, and clean water. In many rural comm ...

2023

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

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

Dataset for a flume experiment on sediment augmentation

Christian Mörtl

Dataset for the paper "Influence of hydrograph shape and sediment augmentation repetition frequency on sediment transport dynamics and bed morphology evolution". It includes coordinates of the defined areas of interest and digital elevation models from the ...

EPFL2022

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

Learning to Simulate Realistic LiDARs

Pascal Fua, Benoît Alain René Guillard

Simulating realistic sensors is a challenging part in data generation for autonomous systems, often involving carefully handcrafted sensor design, scene properties, and physics modeling. To alleviate this, we introduce a pipeline for data-driven simulation ...

2022

STATNet: Spatial-temporal attention in the traffic prediction

Alexandre Massoud Alahi, Seyed Mohamad Moghadas, Amin Gheibi

Recent traffic flow prediction methods are lacking abilities to determine predictive features. Thus, they will propagate the error in the next timestamps. In this paper, first, we assess the role of spatial and temporal features on the traffic speed predic ...

2022

Inception of Regular Valley Spacing in Fluvial Landscapes: A Linear Stability Analysis

Sara Bonetti, Shashank Kumar Anand

Incipient valley formation in mountainous landscapes is often associated with their presence at a regular spacing under diverse hydroclimatic forcings. Here we provide a formal linear stability theory for a landscape evolution model (LEM) representing the ...

2022

Contact.engineering-Create, analyze and publish digital surface twins from topography measurements across many scales

Till Junge, Abhijeet Gujrati

The optimization of surface finish to improve performance, such as adhesion, friction, wear, fatigue life, or interfacial transport, occurs largely through trial and error, despite significant advancements in the relevant science. There are three central c ...

IOP Publishing Ltd2022

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

Multiscale Very High Resolution Topographic Models in Alpine Ecology: Pros and Cons of Airborne LiDAR and Drone-Based Stereo-Photogrammetry Technologies

Stéphane Joost, Estelle Rochat, Kevin Leempoel, Annie Sandrine Guillaume, Aude Rogivue

The vulnerability of alpine environments to climate change presses an urgent need to accurately model and understand these ecosystems. Popularity in the use of digital elevation models (DEMs) to derive proxy environmental variables has increased over the p ...

2021

Evaluating a prediction system for snow management

Michael Lehning

The evaluation of snowpack models capable of accounting for snow management in ski resorts is a major step towards acceptance of such models in supporting the daily decision-making process of snow production managers. In the framework of the EU Horizon 202 ...

COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH2021

3DPD: A photogrammetric pipeline for a PUSH frame stereo cameras

Nicolas Le Thomas

An innovative photogrammetric pipeline has been developed by INAF-Padova for the processing of the stereo images from the CaSSIS (Colour and Stereo Imaging System) (Thomas et al., 2014). CaSSIS is the multispectral stereo push frame camera on board ExoMars ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2021

Mechanisms of slab avalanche release and impact in the Dyatlov Pass incident in 1959

Johan Alexandre Philippe Gaume

The Dyatlov Pass incident is an intriguing unsolved mystery from the last century. In February 1959, a group of nine experienced Russian mountaineers perished during a difficult expedition in the northern Urals. A snow avalanche hypothesis was proposed, am ...

SPRINGERNATURE2021

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

The sediment challenge of Swiss river corridors interrupted by man-made reservoirs

Giovanni De Cesare, Pedro Filipe De Almeida Manso, Samuel Luke Vorlet, Christian Mörtl

Depending on their characteristics and management, man-made reservoirs can have a significant impact on the natural sediment continuity of rivers. We classify different reservoir types and describe potential risks for the dam and downstream river reach. Ou ...

CRC Press2020

REMA topography and AntarcticaLC2000 for WRF

Michael Lehning, Franziska Gerber

Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica (REMA) topography and AntarcticaLC2000 landuse dataare now available as static data input for the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF). Topographyand landuse are made available at a spatial resolution of 1 km ...

2020

Three-dimensional wind-turbine wake characterization via tomographic particle-image velocimetry

Fernando Porté Agel, Arslan Salim Dar

Wind turbines are often sited on different topographical features. In the current work, we performed wind-tunnel measurements of the wake behind a single wind turbine sited on two escarpments differing in the windward side shape using tomographic particle- ...

IOP Publishing2020