Field Observation in Climatology and Environmental Hydrology - Detailseite

There will be a preliminary meeting for all participants of Module 5.1, Thursday, April, 18^th, 2019 at 16:00 (st) in room 1'227 for detailed information on field courses, lectures, and other course requirements.

The lecture comprises topics of climatological and micro-meteorological ("The climate near the ground", Moritz Langer) and hydrological ("Eco-Hydrology", Doerthe Tetzlaff) field methods to understand land-atmosphere-water processes and interactions. Central are the energy and mass exchange between atmosphere and ground, boundary layer metrology (including the eddy-covariance method), glaciological field methods, as well as hydrological field methods (velocity measurements and discharge estimations), measurement of hydrological processes that is precipitation, soilwater, groundwater, surface waters, and environmental tracer measurements.
 
The lectures are blocked into 6 slots of 4 hours on Thursday 9-13, starting May, 23rd and ending July, 4th, 2019.
 
For the field course there are two choices and one can voluntarily chose both if one wish:
 
1) Italian Alps at Marteller Hütte in South Tyrol, Italy (Alto Adige, Italia), August 24th to August 31th 2019, 5 full days in the field. Field work is on proglacial and periglacial grounds and on the glacier "Fürkelenferner". Alpine experience is not required. However, necessary are trekking or mountaineering boots and clothing suitable for high alpine environment. The costs of the field course per student are approximately 300 EUR. We can accommodate maximum 16 students in this course. Those interested in participating in this field course must visit a short introduction meeting on April 18th (room Zonda 1227, 16:00 st).

2) Berlin- Brandenburg catchments and rivers: 12.08-16.08.2019. For this we will visit and work in the two tributaries of the Spree catchment, an urban river (The Erpe in the SE of Berlin) and a rural river (the Demnitzer Mill Creek Catchment, ca. 45 min SE of Berlin). This field practical will take place at 5 day excursions. Both catchments are representative for the Berlin and Brandenburg landscape in terms of their heterogeneous landuse of agriculture, wetland and forest areas in the rural catchment and an urban influenced catchment at the Erpe. The Erpe is characterised by a typical urban mosaic structure of impervious and pervious areas, urban drainage systems and a water treatment plant. In the Demnitzer MillCreek, recently, beavers are having a major effect on the structure and consequent functioning of the system. Both sites are ideal to conduct a range of hydrological and climatological practical field investigations on the land-atmosphere-water interface.

Please be aware that students in the M.Sc. Global Change Geography must take either Module  5.1 or 5.2. However, you can take both modules by replacing one of the free electives (Module 7.0/8.0) by either 5.1 or 5.2. Module 5.2 is organized through the group of Patrick Hostert in remote sensing.

Exercises & homework (partly reading assignments) parallel to the lecture; field report to selected field data in the form of a scientific paper after the field course; the field report is due on November 1st, 2019; the final module examination in the form of an oral examination of approximately 20 minutes concludes the module is scheduled for November 14th, 2019.