Subsurface 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]

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]

Organizing a Workshop as an ECS: Lessons learned from “Cryosphere-groundwater interactions: a missing link in mountain water research”

Marit van Tiel, Lauren Somers, Caroline Aubry-Wake and Franzi Koch July 12, 2023

Plenary discussion on the outcomes of one of the group discussions on “where does the water go in the glacierized landscape”?

Despite the importance of mountains for downstream water supply, there are large gaps in our scientific understanding of how snow and ice meltwater travels through the landscape, specifically which flowpaths meltwater takes below the surface. Plus, existing knowledge is scattered throughout various sub-disciplines of mountain hydrology: glaciology, snow science, hydrogeology, and surface hydrology ...[Read More]