ESR3 at “Applications of weather and cloud radars” Summer School
The ITaRS fellow Pilar Gumà-Claramunt attended the Summer School on Applications of weather and cloud radars, which was held from 9th to 13th June 2014 at Hyytiälä Forestry Field Station in Southern Finland.
ITaRS fellow hosted for a secondment at NTUA in Athens
by Robert Banks
Robert Banks (ESR13) was hosted for a month-long secondment from the 17th of May to the 15th of June in the Laser Remote Sensing Unit (LRSU) at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in Greece. The LRSU is a part of the Physics Department at NTUA. Opportunistically, this secondment coincided with the HygrA-CD (from Hygroscopic Aerosols to Cloud Droplets) campaign. The main contribution from the secondment was to make use of the established know-how of numerical weather prediction from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and link it with remote sensing instruments (lidars, ceilometer, and microwave radiometer) to study the planetary boundary layer (PBL) over Athens.
ITaRS fellows at Raymetrics
In May 2014 I and Ioannis Binietoglou accomplished a secondment to Raymetrics in Athens. Raymetrics is a company focusing on designing and building the laser remote sensing systems for scientific and commercial purposes. The secondment procedure was conducted by George Georgoussis, general manager of Raymetrics. During the secondment we got introduced to the staff personnel of the firm and to the routine of lidar designing and manufacturing.
Weather stations to the roofs of Delft's high schools
The WaterLab project focuses on understanding the urban water system in the context of extensive urbanization and climate change . The goal of this project is to assess the variability of meteorological parameters within urban areas like Delft, Netherlands. It involves the scientific community and citizens and is sponsored by different Dutch organizations.
Estimating the variability of meteorological fields at the scale of a city area would requires a dense network of instruments and the availability of specialists for the efficiency of an early alert system. This is unfortunately not feasible for a matter of costs and personnel. However, the interaction between scientists and citizens, who would use cheaper non-specialized data collectors, could solve the problem. Moreover, it is a chance to prepare and motivate more people to be interested in the field of urban water system issues.