Atmospheric Sciences

Why should we care about a building’s energy consumption?

Dasaraden Mauree September 8, 2015

Integration of solar Photovoltaic panels on buildings on the EPFL campus (Image credit cisbat.epfl.ch)

From the 9th to the 11th of September the Solar Energy and Buildings Physics laboratory is hosting the CISBAT conference. This international meeting is seen as a leading platform for interdisciplinary dialog in the field of sustainability in the built environment. More than 250 scientists and people from the industry will be at EPFL in Lausanne to talk about topics from solar nanotechnologies to t ...[Read More]

Urban Climate

Dasaraden Mauree July 21, 2015

Example of an idealized Urban Heat Island - Temperature above an urban area (taken from http://www.uta.edu)

The 9th International Conference on Urban Climate and the 12th Urban Environment Symposium are taking place this week in the “Pink City” Toulouse. With the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) which will be held in December in Paris, the obvious focus topic for the urban climate conference is the mitigation and adaptation to climate change in urban environment. But, first of all, why should we even ...[Read More]

What is the biggest air pollution event in the modern era?

Thomas Webb June 24, 2015

Centre of the Laki fissure, Iceland today. Credit: Daniele Trippanera (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

It’s hard to think of the scale of the biggest air pollution event in the modern era. Immediately my mind conjures up memories of black and white photographs of the Great London Smog of 1952. Then I start thinking bigger, how about the 1.2 billion vehicles world-wide on the road churning out nitrogen dioxide every single day? Well these are a drop in the ocean compared with bigger industrial pollu ...[Read More]

An unlikely choice between a gasoline or diesel car…

Dasaraden Mauree June 1, 2015

I have recently been confronted with the choice of buying a “new” car and this has proved to be a very tedious task with all the diversity of car that exists on the market today. However, one of my primary concerns was, of course, to find the least polluting car based on my usage (roughly 15000km/year). Cars (or I should say motor vehicles) pollution is one of the major sources of air pollution (p ...[Read More]

How we might lose the battle against climate change … or against any other environmental problem?

Dasaraden Mauree March 6, 2015

Smog over the East coast of China (Copyright: NASA)

This would not be a blog about atmospheric science if I did not talk about climate change. But I won’t be talking about the science of climate change… there are numerous blogs including here that will talk much better about this. The problem that will be addressed here does not only refer to the “battle” we are currently facing with climate but also numerous other environmental issues ...[Read More]

Welcome to the AS division blog

Dasaraden Mauree February 10, 2015

The Atmospheric Sciences Division of the EGU is launching its new blog. This blog hopes to address a number of topics, as well as the major challenges, related to the atmospheric sciences. In this introductory post, I would like to present some of the topics we will address here and also some hurdles the scientific community is trying to overcome. First, let’s agree on some definition ...[Read More]