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RainGain Final Conference, from 8th to 9th of June 2015

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Jun 122015

RainGain is a project within the Framework of the COP21 Preparation and stands for

“RESEARCHERS & WATER MANAGERS PREPARING CITIES FOR A CHANGING CLIMATE”

The EU INTERREG NWE IVB RainGain project has focused on recent remote sensing technologies to achieve a finer urban water management and to build up resilience to weather extremes and climate change. The RainGain conference will address all the issues related to high-resolution rainfall measurement, nowcasting and hydrological modelling, as well as their advanced applications to urban water management and stakeholder’s capacity building.

More info can be found here:

http://www.raingain.eu/en/raingain-final-conference-regitration-open

The poster that was presented was titled: ” Dual-Polarimetric X-Band Weather Radar: Accurate Rainfall Estimation and Storm Observations ” and can be found here.

More RainGain news:

International RainGain Workshop on March 24th 2015 in Rotterdam.

Topics:

Extreme rainfall in Jakarta
Amsterdam Rainproof
Coping with extreme rainfall
Added value X-band radar

More info can be found in: http://www.raingain.eu/en/node/4619

http://www.raingain.eu/en/raingain-international-workshop-rotterdam-0

by Ricardo Reinoso Rondinel

ATMOS group Posters at EGU 2015

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Apr 202015

Last week Stephanie Prianto Rusli and Lukas Pfitzenmaier presented posters at the European Geoscience Union in Vienna. This conference gave a grate opportunity to meet a brought range of scientists from all kinds of Geoscience and come into discussion. It also gave the opportunity to go into interdisciplinary sessions and generate new ideas.

Stephanies poster was in the the session: Remote Sensing of Clouds and Aerosols: Techniques and Applications and its title: Multi-sensor approach to retrieving water cloud physical properties and drizzle fraction (poster here)

Lukas poster could be find in the new session about Observing and modeling processes in moderately supercooled clouds and was dealing with Effect of cloud microphysics on particle growth under mixed phase conditions (poster here). Discussions and comments within the supercooled cloud community where very fruitful and caused quite some attention. So the changes are high to have a second one in the next EGU 2016.

Atmospheric Observation course _ GRS master

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Apr 022015

In a few weeks (in the 4th quarter), the third edition of the Atmospheric observation course (CIE4608) will start at the CEG faculty. The course is focusing on the observation of the different atmospheric components that are required for current weather and climate applications at different temporal and spatial scales and from different observation plateforms.

For TU Delft students it is now possible to enrol to the course. More information can be found on the study guide by clicking on this link. I will be leading the course, so feel free to contact me if any further question via the link above.

Find below the flyer for the course this year:

I’m looking forward to see you all soon,

Yann

ITaRS Workshop at UPC, Barcelona

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Mar 252015

The fellows from the ITaRS network met between March 18th-20th 2015 in Barcelona, at UPC (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya).

The two first days were dedicated on a course about writing skills. Two lecturers from WAS gave us tips and advice to understand better the process of writing a scientific paper. The fellows had to prepare an abstract for a possible article in order to receive direct feedback to improve the understandability of this short text. The interactivity of the lectures made them very interesting. Important to mention is the powerful impact these advice can have on our future scientific publications.

The last day was consecrated to data assimilation. Two researchers from ECMWF (Reading, UK) came to introduce this concept. They explained how observations are useful and important in order to increase the predictability of the weather forecasts. The lectures were very interesting and the quality of their content was at very high scientific level.

We got the chance to visit some of the installations of UPC. We visited the building which houses the impressive supercomputer called MareNostrum (1 petaflop of speed!). The funny fact comes from the original use of this building: it was indeed a former chapel as you can see on the picture.

Finally, it was good to see again all the fellows. We managed to find time to discuss and speak about questions related to ITaRS. We also enjoyed a bit of the nice life of this pretty city.
Ole! 🙂

Last news about Waterlab

Climatology, Measurements, Urban Precipitation No Responses »

Mar 142015

On Wednesday 29th October 2014 was the official kick-off meeting of Waterlab which took place in the Science Center of TU Delft (link1, link2). Almost 300 pupils from primary schools of Delft had a first hint about science and rain measurements.

Currently, four primary schools in Delft area are involved in the project. The teachers and pupils measure local precipitations with handmade raingauges and compile all measurements to a dedicated website called MijnWaterlab. Besides these observations, rainfall intensities are also measured continuously since September 2014 with weather stations located in each of these schools (see picture on the right) in order to have a better idea about the variability of precipitation at the scale of a city. Easy comparisons can be made between each dataset.
On the other hand, in the upcoming weeks, students from secondary schools from Delft will integrate the project and the roof of these lyceums will be equipped with a station for measuring rainfalls. The students there will have to deal with scientific projects in relation with the analysis of these observations.

Since today, another weather station is also located in the Science Center to continue with the densification of the network of stations in Delft. The particularity of this station is that the data are collected automatically via wired internet connection with the use of a RaspberryPi-based system (see picture on the right) that was under development during the last months.
A quasi-similar configuration (using 3G wireless internet connection) will be applied very soon to the stations installed in schools (currently a visit to each school is needed to manually collect the data).

Participitation at the TOPROF meeting Roskilde, Denmark

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Nov 272014

In the last ITaRS Summer School on “Clouds and Precipitation: Observation and Processes”, which was held in the Jülich Research Center (Germany), the group working on the topic “When does a cloud form?” was selected as the one that made the best work in such a short period of time. The name of the group was “The Transformers” and the integrants were Elisa Adirosi (CNR-ISAC, Rome, Italy), Pilar Gumà-Claramunt (CNR-IMAA, Potenza, Italy), Lukas Pfitzenmaier (TU Delft, The Netherlands), Stefanos Samaras (University of Potsdam, Germany) and Veronika Wolf (DWD, Lindenberg, Germany)

The Transformers were awarded with the possibility to attend the meeting of TOPROF, the acronym of a COST Action standing for “Towards operational ground based profiling with ceilometers, doppler lidars and microwave radiometers for improving weather forecasts”, which was held in the DTU Risø Campus in Roskilde, Denmark. There, the students presented to the participants of the meeting the ITaRS project, the work they did during the Summer School, the Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer (AERI) instrument and their individual research projects. Furthermore, they attended many interesting talks, participated in the working groups meetings (ceilometers [WG1], Doppler lidars [WG2], Microwave radiometers [WG3] and/or Data assimilation [WG4]) and had the opportunity to discuss with experts in Remote Sensing of the atmosphere.

Finally, the three ITaRS students stayed one day after the meeting to visit Copenhagen

We would like to thank ITaRS and TOPROF for the opportunity of attending this interesting experience.

ACCEPT campaign HALO measurements

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Oct 312014

Today we went to Cabauw to fix some radar issues that we have. The weather forecast of today was good for lidar measurements too we started the Raman-lidar CAELI as well. As you can see as all the measurement quick-looks for the lidar systems (Polly and CAELI) we had some nice cirrus layer over Cabauw. So we expected also that our colleagues from Munich would have a good change to observe some HALOs within the cirrus clouds. But the conditions where that good, that we could also observe this HALOs over Cabauw.

10-31_02

Halos are optical reflections produced by hexagonal oriented ice crystals within ice clouds. This reflections produce a ring around the sun and also some bright dots next to the sun. Observations of such HALOs make it possible to get information about the ice crystal shape and their orientation. Lidar measurements could also give such information. Combining the measurements of the lidar systems and the HALO-camera in de Bilt will hopefully produce some nice results.

10-31_04 10-31_07

ACCEPT Campaign measurements

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Oct 252014

Yesterday, Fr 24-10-2014, was a realy nice measurement day. A lot of mid-level clouds over Cabauw and all instruments where running and measuring smothly. Only the lidar systems where not able to penetrate the clouds, because of the precipitation that was present during the whole day. The overpassing front systems produced the whole day real nice clouds that we measured. To capture the vertical structure of the cloud system and the atmosphere we launched some radiosondes. So all in all we are happy that we could measure this clouds. With those information I wish a nice weekend!

ACCEPT campaign update

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Oct 232014

The last days have been quite windy and rainy. That is also the reason why we didn’t spend so much time on the site. We launched some days ago some weather balloon. Such a radiosonde takes about 30 minutes of preparations before it is launched. First the balloon has to be filled with the right amount of Helium. Then the parachute attached and finally the sonde itself has to be tied up to the parachute. One important point to take into account before the launch is the wind speed and the direction. This prevents the sonde from being caught by trees or one cable of the Cabauw tower.

With such a radiosonde it is possible to get vertical information about temperature, pressure, humidity and wind as the balloon is ascending in the atmosphere. This information help us to define thermodynamic conditions under which some of the microphysical processes can take place and some don’t. Several launches after each other also contain information about the variability of the atmospheric state. So all in all this small device is a real useful tool for our campaign.

ATMOS group attended the 14th Conference on Cloud Physics and 14th Conference on Atmospheric Radiation

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Oct 232014

In July this year ATMOS group attended the 14th Conference on Cloud Physics and 14th Conference on Atmospheric Radiation which were held together in Boston. The conference is organised by the American Meteorological Society every 3 years. It is one of the biggest conferences in Cloud Physics and Radiation field.

We were presenting two posters:

How Can We Use Lidar And Radar To Monitor Aerosol-Cloud Interaction? presented by Karolina Sarna
The satellite observation of drizzle in Stratocumulus clouds presented by Igor Stepanov

If you are interested in the recordings from the Conference or Extended Abstracts, have a look here:

https://ams.confex.com/ams/14CLOUD14ATRAD/webprogram/start.html