Storm Boris is the latest in a series of deluges during one of Europe’s most flood-prone periods in 500 years, yet Vienna managed to avoid major damage. The city’s preparations may offer valuable lessons for other urban areas facing similar challenges. Dealing With Record Rainfall: September 2024 in Vienna When record rainfall hit Vienna on September 15, the impact was severe: submerged roa ...[Read More]
Hortonian overland flow – if you have ever followed a hydrology class, you have certainly come across this jargon: this is the name of a hydrological process – when rainfall flows off at the terrain surface because the rainfall intensity is so high that not all the water can infiltrate into the soil (rainfall intensity is higher than infiltration capacity). Almost every hydrological m ...[Read More]
The peril of rising sea levels due to global climate change is evident, posing significant threats. Conversely, inland seas and lakes experience declining water levels, exacerbated by heightened evaporation and diminishing inflows, presenting alarming consequences. Between 1992 and 2020, 53% of global inland water bodies experienced significant declines Currently, several lakes worldwide, such as ...[Read More]
You got all your components for your project, so now it’s all about getting it all together. Then it’s great to be able to quickly exchange components and change wiring. That’s where a so-called “breadboard” comes in handy. It’s an easy to use device where you can connect microelectronic components without the need to solder anything. Breadboards are like pinboards for cables and microelect ...[Read More]
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]
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]
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]
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]
This is not (only) a flood. Inspired by Magritte’s painting: ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ After an alarming dry winter, the European continent has been enduring weeks of a record-breaking heatwave across the southern regions, while coping with scattered, intense precipitation and flash floods. In Zaragoza (Spain), recent flash floods swiftly transformed the previously dry landscape into raging rivers ...[Read More]
With advancing climate change, mitigation measures are necessary to fight urban heat islands. Reactivating urban streams as blue-green infrastructures can contribute to this mitigation, and serve as an invaluable water resource. Urban streams – banned to the underground In urban areas, hydrological conditions have been modified, impacted or completely changed for centuries. Rivers and stre ...[Read More]