Publications related to Overview: Integrative and Comprehensive Understanding on Polar Environments (iCUPE) – concept and initial results

Organ-specific biotransformation in salmonids: Insight into intrinsic enzyme activity and biotransformation of three micropollutants

Aquatic ecosystems continue to be threatened by chemical pollution. To what extent organisms are able to cope with chemical exposure depends on their ability to display mechanisms of defense across different organs. Among these mechanisms, biotransformatio ...

Elsevier2024

Overview of the Alaskan Layered Pollution and Chemical Analysis (ALPACA) Field Experiment

Roman Pohorsky, Julia Schmale, Athanasios Nenes, Sukriti Kapur, Andrea Baccarini

The Alaskan Layered Pollution And Chemical Analysis (ALPACA) field experiment was a collaborative study designed to improve understanding of pollution sources and chemical processes during winter (cold climate and low-photochemical activity), to investigat ...

2024

Polar oceans and sea ice in a changing climate

Jenny Thomas, Julia Schmale, Hélène Paule Angot

Polar oceans and sea ice cover 15% of the Earth’s ocean surface, and the environment is changing rapidly at both poles. Improving knowledge on the interactions between the atmospheric and oceanic realms in the polar regions, a Surface Ocean–Lower Atmospher ...

2023

Assessment of personal exposure to particle and gaseous air pollutants in residences and offices

Maria Viviana Gonzalez Serrano

Poor indoor air quality has been associated with health issues and decreased work performance. Personal exposure that takes place both in outdoor and indoor environments is the result of dy-namic processes and complex interactions between people and surrou ...

EPFL2023

CRYOWRF—Model Evaluation and the Effect of Blowing Snow on the Antarctic Surface Mass Balance

Michael Lehning, Varun Sharma, Franziska Gerber

The surface mass balance (SMB) of large polar ice sheets and of snow and ice surfaces in general are incompletely understood because of the complexity of processes involved. One such process, drifting and blowing snow, has only been considered in a very si ...

AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION2023

Addressing chemical pollution in biodiversity research

Kristin Schirmer, Colette vom Berg, Ahmed Tlili

Climate change, biodiversity loss, and chemical pollution are planetary-scale emergencies requiring urgent mitigation actions. As these "triple crises" are deeply interlinked, they need to be tackled in an integrative manner. However, while climate change ...

WILEY2023

Synthesis Report on the Environmental Impacts of Polar Research and Logistics in the Polar Regions

Jérôme Chappellaz

Polar sciences are crucial to understand the effects of climate change. 6 out of 9 eco-tipping points identified by the IPCC are situated in the polar regions. Potential rising sea levels, altered weather patterns and changes in sea-currents are all connec ...

2023

High concentration of black carbon in northern Pakistan: Characteristics, source apportionment and emission source regions

Arindam Roy

Atmospheric Black Carbon (BC) is one of the absorbing components of solar radiation which potentially affects human health and regional climate. In the current study, BC mass concentrations were regularly observed for pre-monsoon and monsoon seasons using ...

Elsevier2023

Using machine learning to generate an open-access cropland map from satellite images time series in the Indian Himalayan region

Danya Li

Crop maps are crucial for agricultural monitoring and food management and can additionally support domain-specific applications, such as setting cold supply chain infrastructure in developing countries. Machine learning (ML) models, combined with freely-av ...

Elsevier2023

Improved marine debris detection in satellite imagery with automatic refinement of coarse hand annotations

Devis Tuia, Marc Conrad Russwurm, Elif Dilge Gül

Plastic litter is a major environmental hazard that endangers human, animal, and plant health on the planet. A substantial portion of plastic pollutants is washed from rivers and beaches into the oceans and aggregates at the surface as marine debris before ...

2023

Coupling remote sensing and particle tracking to estimate trajectories in large water bodies

Alfred Johny Wüest, Damien Bouffard, Tamar Kohn, Chaojie Li

Propelled by the rapid development of equipment, technology and computational power, the monitoring and simulation of the hydrodynamics in lakes have steadily advanced. In contrast, water quality simulations are more difficult to implement, due to the diff ...

Elsevier2022

An innovative autonomous robotic system for on-site detection of heavy metal pollution plumes in surface water

Alexander Haider, Qiuyue Yang, Bhawna Nagar

Smart monitoring has been studied and developed in recent years to create faster, cheaper, and more user-friendly on-site methods. The present study describes an innovative technology for investigative monitoring of heavy metal pollution (Cu and Pb) in sur ...

SPRINGER2022

Techno-economic and environmental impact assessment of an olive tree pruning waste multiproduct biorefinery

Elia Mercedes Ruiz Pachon

This work focuses on the economic performance and environmental assessment of two biorefinery schemes using 100 t/day of olive tree pruning waste as feedstock. The first scheme is based on a multiproduct biorefinery producing 6363.64 m3/yr of ethanol, 999. ...

ELSEVIER2022

Towards reliable retrievals of cloud droplet number for non-precipitating planetary boundary layer clouds and their susceptibility to aerosol

Athanasios Nenes, Paraskevi Georgakaki, Romanos Foskinis

Remote sensing has been a key resource for developing extensive and detailed datasets for studying and constraining aerosol-cloud-climate interactions. However, aerosol-cloud collocation challenges, algorithm limitations, as well as difficulties in unravel ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022

Importance of 3D radiative transfer effects on high-resolution NO2 remote sensing in cities

Marc Damien Schwärzel

Urban air quality is a major concern in the context of human health since cities are at the same time emission hot spots and home to a large fraction of the world's population. Airborne imaging spectrometers may be a valuable addition to traditional air po ...

EPFL2022

The cis-lunar ecosystem — A systems model and scenarios of the resource industry and its impact

Jean-Paul Richard Kneib

Lunar resources is one of the many new putative business models that may transform space logistics. Yet it competes with Earth-based resources, in a complex trade-off involving both tech development & socioeconomic dynamics. This study models the size vs. ...

2021

Deep Learning‐based Semantic Segmentation in Remote Sensing

Devis Tuia

Semantic segmentation consists of the generation of a categorical map, given an image in which each pixel of the image is automatically assigned a class. Deep learning allows the influence of the pixel's context to be learned by capturing the non-linear re ...

Wiley2021

Nighttime chemistry of biomass burning emissions in urban areas: A dual mobile chamber study

Athanasios Nenes, Spyros Pandis

Residential biomass burning for heating purposes is an important source of air pollutants during winter. Here we test the hypothesis that significant secondary organic aerosol production can take place even during winter nights through oxidation of the emi ...

Copernicus GmbH2021

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

Effect thresholds of metals in stream sediments based on in situ oligochaete communities

Maria del Carmen Casado Martinez, Benoît Jean Dominique Ferrari, Régis Lionel Vivien

Aquatic oligochaetes, comprising a large number of species showing various degrees of resistance to chemical pollution, are recognized as valuable bioindicators of sediments’ quality. In the Geneva area (Switzerland), oligochaete tools were previously test ...

2020