Catchment hydrology

Overlooked tips for the lost art of fieldwork

Natalie Ceperley February 29, 2024

The author finalizing installation of a meteorological station in the Vallon de Nant, just in the kink of time (before winter truly begins).

Not so long ago, almost all hydrologic data depended almost exclusively on fieldwork. Today, sure, you can download data from repositories, there are satellites that beam you magic numbers that you can interpret to give you almost any variable, and some (less than we might hope) long-term monitoring has been outsourced to governments (or in some cases to citizens with sensors). But somewhere in ...[Read More]

Do-It-Yourself (DIY) in Geoscience Miniseries – Part 2: Sensors & Electronics

Jonas Pyschik February 1, 2024

As a child, I was a huge fan of LEGO. I would spend hours building and creating structures, vehicles and landscapes. For every birthday & Christmas, I wished for the newest sets of these colorful plastic bricks. While building the sets manually was fun, creating something new from my own fantasy was even better. It seemed like once I had a substantial amount of different bricks, combination po ...[Read More]

Communicating science to the public – an example after the recent floods in Germany

Bettina Schaefli January 25, 2024

Extensive flooding in the Emsland flood area, photo: Flugschule Dankern

After the wet December 2023, the year 2024 started with widespread flooding in parts of Europe. Flooding during winter times is not unusual but brings particular challenges in terms of spatial extent, and the impact on people can be exacerbated when flooding comes with very low temperatures. The exceptionally wet and warm winter necessarily triggers questions from the public about how this links t ...[Read More]

Do-It-Yourself (DIY) in Geoscience Miniseries – Part 1: Microcontrollers

Jonas Pyschik November 30, 2023

We geoscientists need all different kinds of data: soil moisture, water-levels, snow height, radiation, precipitation height and the list goes on. However, the devices we need to generate that data are often too expensive, not available or even don’t exist. Therefore, it’s sometimes necessary to build them yourself (like many geoscientists do – those who annually present their senors p ...[Read More]