Awards and publications
2023
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Nick van de Giesen received the award for empowering sub-saharan African communities in measuring and understanding their climate and improve local climate resilience. Nick is co-founder of the TAHMO project, which has developed and installed a vast network of 640 weather stations across Africa.
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Clouds are responsible for a large part of the uncertainty in climate projections. With a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC), Franziska Glassmeier aims to better understand the evolution of clouds and their influence on the future climate.
2022
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A sustainable accessible city, without private cars? XCARCITY develops digital twins of low-car urban areas, based on measured and simulated mobility data of people and goods. The researchers apply these virtual models to test various scenarios and interventions for addressing specific problems in the cities of Almere, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam.
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Future Flood Risk Management Technologies for rivers and coasts. The Future FRM Tech programme develops flood resilient landscapes for rivers and estuaries as well as technical solutions for water barriers – explicitly addressing any legal, economic and governance aspects that may impede their practical use. They use case studies for the Lek and Geul rivers in the Zeeland province.
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Climate change and increased pollution present drinking water operators with an increasing challenge to monitor and ensure the quality of our drinking water. The international consortium ToDrinQ develops, among other things, new technologies for real-time detection of pollution.
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The report authored by a team of 40 African researchers and co-authors from institutes including UCL, University of Oxford and TU Delft, highlights the different starting points, solutions and uncertainties faced by countries and their impact on meeting development goals. It calls for a shift in how politicians, funders and researchers think about the clean energy transition in the African continent. The paper reveals the differing technological, economic, financial, and social needs of countries to enable them to meet development goals.
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Frequency effects in the dynamic lateral stiffness of monopiles in sand: insight from field tests and 3D FE modelling
The aim of this work is to shed new light on dynamic soil–monopile interaction, based on the results of unique full-scale experiments performed at the Westermeerwind wind park (Netherlands). The response of a 24 m long, 5 m diameter monopile to harmonic lateral loading of varying amplitude and frequency is inspected. The analysis of original field measurements (soil accelerations and pore pressures) enables the lateral stiffness observed at the monopile head to be linked to dynamic effects occurring in the surrounding soil. The interpretation of measured data is supported by three-dimensional finite-element studies, which also look at the influence of drainage conditions and monopile size. The set of results presented supports the need for dynamics-based monopile design, as higher frequencies gain relevance in the most recent offshore wind developments.
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In the paper we interpret the hydromechanical behaviour of a steep, forested, instrumented slope during an artificial rainfall event, which triggered a shallow slope failure. The soil’s mechanical response has been simulated. Failure occurs within a colluvium shallow soil cover, characterised as a silty sand of low plasticity. The hydraulic and mechanical parameters are calibrated, based on an extended set of experimental results. The results are compared with field data of the mechanistic and the hydraulic responses up to failure and are found to provide a very satisfactory prediction. The study identifies water exfiltration from bedrock fissures as the main triggering agent.
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Ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet is one of the largest sources of contemporary sea-level rise (SLR). While process-based models place timescales on Greenland’s deglaciation, their confidence is obscured by model shortcomings including imprecise atmospheric and oceanic couplings. Here, we present a complementary approach resolving ice sheet disequilibrium with climate constrained by satellite-derived bare-ice extent, tidewater sector ice flow discharge and surface mass balance data. We find that Greenland ice imbalance with the recent (2000–2019) climate commits at least 274 ± 68 mm SLR from 59 ± 15 × 103 km2 ice retreat, equivalent to 3.3 ± 0.9% volume loss, regardless of twenty-first-century climate pathways. This is a result of increasing mass turnover from precipitation, ice flow discharge and meltwater run-off.
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Cultural heritage sites all over the world are increasingly threatened by urbanisation and climate change. Entire historic cities are progressively damaged by sinking coastal land and subsidence at regional scale. Current mitigation measures have limited effect as they are based on local data for single monuments, making it impossible to recognise general relationships between climate change effects and structural degradation mechanisms. This project aims to develop the first integration between satellite data and computational models of heritage degradation at regional scale. This integration will offer new fundamental insight into the resilience of cultural heritage sites and potentially transform heritage protection.
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State-of-the-art Earth System Models’ predictions about how severe and how often droughts will occur in a future climate are unreliable. A key component that controls drought is the ability of vegetation to access and take up water stored in soils through its roots and release it as water vapour. In this project the researcher will develop a holistic and adaptive approach with the objective to improve predictions of droughts. This approach differs strongly from the mainstream effort by considering root systems of ecosystems to dynamically adapt in response to changes in rainfall.