River floods are extremely important to society because of their potential damage and fatalities. Floods are also very interesting research subjects because of the intriguing non-linear interactions and feedbacks involved, interesting issues of generalisation and the need for investigating them in an interdisciplinary way. Extreme floods are not very well understood to date but new, high resolution data and new concepts for quantifying interactions promise a major breakthrough of a body of research carried out in a coordinated way. The objective of this Research Unit is to understand in a coherent way the atmospheric, catchment and river system processes and their interactions leading to extreme river floods and how these evolve in space and time. An innovative and coherent concept has been adopted in order to maximise the potential of the cooperation between the research partners which consists of three layers of integration: research themes focusing on the science questions, subprojects revolving around specific research tasks, and a joint study object of extreme floods in Germany and Austria. Using scales as a binding element, the research plan is organised into the research themes of event processes, spatial (regional) variability, temporal (decadal) variability, and uncertainty and predictability. The members of the Research Unit have been selected to obtain a team of leading experts with expertise that is complementary in terms of processes, methods and regional knowledge. The cooperation and communication strategy will be implemented through themed cluster groups, combining several subprojects, regular meetings of the cluster groups, an annual project symposium and a private cloud facilitating data exchange on the joint study object. Equal opportunity policies will be adopted and female and early career scientists will be promoted in a major way. Overall, the outcomes of the Research Unit will constitute a step change in the understanding of the coupled system of flood processes in the atmosphere, catchments and rivers which will have major implications for a range of sciences and the society.
Entwicklung und Erprobung eines weiterbildenden Fernstudienganges Angewandte Umweltwissenschaften mit Diplomabschluss. Gestaltung eines kompletten online-Studienangebotes.
We contribute to the Landsat Science Team with a focus on long-term satellite data analysis, regional to sub-continental approaches and cross-sensor integration between Landsat and European satellite missions. Our focus is on rapidly changing land systems, including topics such as REDD+ or global land use intensification. The Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM provides a backbone activity in Earth observation. The European Sentinel missions, specifically Sentinel-2, and the German Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program (EnMAP) will provide great synergies with Landsat-8 and 40 years of archived Landsat data. There are huge opportunities for synergies across sensors and scales in order to achieve better and quasi-continuous high-resolution earth observation products across time and space. At the same time, there is an urgent need to make use of these opportunities, if we wish to move global change research based on Landsat data to the next level. Our research agenda as part of the Landsat Science Team combines aspects of (1) data characterization, (2) product generation and (3) applications. Our approach seeks to maximize synergies between the exceptional depth of the Landsat archive and future European satellite missions for advancing core land system science topics. Our geographic foci include Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, and South America.
General Information: To be able to plan and manage sustainable development in the coastal zone on both short- and long-term time scales, environmental and socio-economic imperatives require the effective application of our knowledge of coastal ecosystems. Tools are needed to operationally monitor and forecast those parameters which have key functions in these ecosystems. The final goal is the ability to produce routine assessments of the spatial distribution of nutrients at any given moment and to describe its evolution in time. PIONEER will set up analysis systems for routine day-to-day monitoring, analysis and short-term prediction of nutrient distributions in the Odra and Ebro estuaries, which are located in coastal regions with significant impacts from nutrient loads. The project is focussed on integrating presently available technology and methodology in data management, geostatistical and dynamical data assimilation and numerical modelling in cooperation with scientific institutions, management authorities and commercial companies. Since the on-time delivery of reliable nutrient data can be achieved at present only with considerable employment of specialized personnel, the skills and potentials of these systems will be demonstrated during several weeks periods simulating 'real-time' operational conditions with data previously sampled. The perequisites to run such systems under real-time and continuous operational mode will be discussed. As a by-product, the project will offer estimates of the predictability of the estuarine ecosystems on time scales of days and weeks. The overall approach of PIONEER parallels that of weather forecasting in that actual point obervations are brought together with a 'best guess' into a data assimilation scheme. This analysis forms the initial state of the forecast . Since the application of data assimilation to nutrient forecasting is new, three different assimilation schemes of increasing complexity and skill will be explored: straightforward linear interpolation, geostatistics and dynamical data assimilation. Geostatistics uses a model of multivariate spatial-temporal correlation functions to optimally estimate the spatial distribution of a natural resource. Dynamical data assimilation results in a space-time analysis of the system which is dynamically consistent with the data, the guess and the assumed dynamics of the system in order to build an optimal forecast. The two techniques are complementary in the way they make use of the data and help improve understanding of the ecological system. Solutions obtained from each group of methods will be offered to the practitioner for the wide range of resource estimation and forecasting problems faced in estuarine and coastal research. ... Prime Contractor: GKSS-Forschungszentrum Geesthacht, Institut für Gewässerphysik; Geesthacht; Germany.
Following the project idea of the International Women's University, the project area Water focused on environmental topics. The goal was to create awareness of the problems faced and seek solutions cutting across scientific disciplines and national borders. Selection of the topics in this project area was based on resolutions adopted at international conferences such as UNCED - United Nations Conference on Environments and Development, Rio de Janeiro 1992 (in line with the Agenda 21). The idea was to pursue a holistic approach to the subject-matter with a view to developing the women junior scientists' knowledge and skills. At the beginning of the project, an introductory study was conducted covering a variety of fields and disciplines including biology, chemistry, biochemistry, geology, geography, physics, agronomy economics, agricultural sciences, environmental sciences, civil engineering and educational science. This is briefly summarised in the following chapters. And to provide guidelines for further environmental studies, a manual for the analysis of soils and related materials has been compiled.