Customize Consent Preferences

We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.

The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ... 

Always Active

Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.

No cookies to display.

Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.

No cookies to display.

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

No cookies to display.

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

No cookies to display.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

No cookies to display.

Science

Hoping for thunderstorms

Three-hundred climate scientists from nine countries have fanned out across mountainous regions in France, Italy and Spain. TU Delft researchers are also participating in this largest-ever effort to unravel the climatology of the northwestern Mediterranean region


Drifting balloons, airplanes, satellites, radar…no means are left untried to investigate the heavy localized precipitation events and thunderstorms that so often occur in the northwest Mediterranean’s mountain regions in late summer and early autumn and which often lead to flash floods. The precipitations, it is believed, are the result of cold winds from the north colliding or interacting with warm humid air coming from the sea.


“These complex interactions are not really well understood, making the precipitation events difficult to forecast,” says remote sensing expert, Yann Dufournet (CEG faculty), who is participating in the European research project HyMeX (HYdrological cycle in the Mediterranean EXperiment) together with one PhD student and three MSc students.


HyMex’s main goals are to better understand these weather patterns, in order to improve weather predictions, and also to figure out how climate change will influence high-impact weather events. The project was launched by the French scientific community and will last until 2020, by which time a massive amount of data must have been collected.


The Delft team have set up camp recently in southern France (near Montpelier), where they will stay for several months. They have a blog on which they give an impression on the project and their fieldwork.


For their fieldwork, the TU researchers use DTS cables (Distributed Temperature Sensing), among other equipment. These are long fibre-optic cables through which lasers fire pulses of light. As the reflection of these light pulses in the cable depends on the temperature, the researchers can use this device to measure the temperature in rivers or throughout long transects in the ground.


But they also brought with them some heavier equipment: TARA., which is a transportable atmospheric radar system consisting of two high gain antennas installed on a 12 meter long container, with which they perform precipitation and cloud measurements. The system uses Doppler shift to determine particle velocities.


The team hasn’t experienced any thunderstorms yet. “But things might change,” the students write on their blog. “So let’s hope!”


“However we still have quite some interesting cases to look at related to other meteorological situations that we can observe with our TARA radar,” says Dufournet. “These include interesting fog measurements, lightening events, strong wind gust events and different types of interesting clouds, which are formed due to the mountains around us.”

Editor Redactie

Do you have a question or comment about this article?

delta@tudelft.nl

Comments are closed.