Field Observation in Climatology and Environmental Hydrology - Detailseite

There will be a preliminary meeting for all participants of Module 5.1, Thursday, April, 26^th, 2018at 9 am 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", Christoph Schneider) 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, the theory of eddy-covariance measurement systems, , glaciological field methods, hydrological field methods (velocity measurements and discharge estimations), measurement of soilwater, groundwater, surface waters, and environmental tracer measurements.

The lectures are blocked into 6 slots of 4 hours on Thursday 9-13, starting 31^st May and ending 12^th July, 2018. The specific dates will be 31^st May, 7^th June, and 14^th June (Hydrology), and 28^th June, 5^th July, and 12^th July (Climatology).

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), 25th August to 1st September 2018, 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.

2) Brandenburg, Spree catchment: 3^rd – 7^th September. This field practical will take place at 5 day excursions (though there are options to organise accommodation for the 4 nights locally to avoid daily driving). The field site is about 1 hr car drive south-east of Berlin, in the Demnitzer Mill Creek catchment. The catchment is representative for Brandenburg’s landscape in terms of its heterogeneous landuse of agriculture, wetland and forest areas. Recently, beavers are having a major effect on the structure and consequent functioning of the system. The area is ideal to conduct a range of hydrological and climatological practical field investigations on the land-atmosphere-water interface.

A half-day seminar on Friday, 16^th November 2018 concludes the module. On that event the participants report each other on their respective results with max. 15 minutes oral presentations.

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, 2018; the final module examination in the form of an oral examination of approximately 20 minutes concludes the module is scheduled for November 29^th, 2018.