Heat flow in snow is determined by its microstructure and changes the microstructure. We want to answer the following questions: How does the structure influence the heat flow? Where does the heat flow (ice, air, latent heat)? And how do structure and conduction change over time?

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A forest ecosystem model, extended with an avalanche module, is used to study the feedback between climate change driven ecosystem and land use dynamics.

Available languages: German English

Grain boundaries play an essential role in snow mechanics. As the weakest link in the structure they have a huge impact on snow properties. We present a method to identify grain boundaries in three dimensions from volumetric micro-CT images based on their characteristic neck-like shape.

Available languages: English

The project investigates the effects of litter removal on the carbon stock and the nutrient dynamic of various forest soils in Switzerland.

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Artificial snow made with snow cannons differs a lot from natural snow. We are able to produce nature-identical snow in our cold-laboratories in Davos by supersaturating cold air.

Available languages: German English

The aim of this project is the accurate prediction of the spatial distribution of local surface temperatures in mountainous terrain, what is in particular of interest for a detailed winter surface energy balance for avalanche formation and road surface condition prediction. It is found that a detailed surface radiation balance is essential.

Available languages: English

Alpine3D is a spatially distributed (surface), three dimensional (atmospheric) model for analyzing and predicting dynamics of snow-dominated surface processes in mountainous topography. It includes models for snow cover, vegetation and soil, snow transport, radiation transfer and runoff which can be enabled or disabled on demand. The model supports a variety of input options including interpolation of meteorological weather stations, input from a meteorological model or from remote sensing data (MeteoIO) and has been parallelized in order to run on computing grids or clusters.

Available languages: English

In a joint research project with Ukrainian partners we compare the structures of the virgin beech forest Uholka in Ukraine with those of the Sihlwald near Zurich and assess the development process of Sihlwald from commercial forest back to "virgin forest".

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Projekte der FE Oekologische Genetik

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The chemistry of soil solution and the soil water availability for plants have been monitored since 1997 in seven forest plots in Switzerland. This project, linked to the Swiss Long-term Forest Ecosystem Research project (LWF), aims to assess the soil response to atmospheric pollution (acidifying substances and nitrogen) and to climate change.

Available languages: English