heat waves

Event Campaigns

Heat wave campaigns can be performed from spring until late autumn in Germany and European regions. The complex interactions between the land surface, vegetation, aquatic systems and the atmosphere require observation scales that range from several square kilometers up to several 1000 square kilometers. Satellite data as well as airborne remote sensing will be used to identify areas that are most affected and to optimize the observing systems. Full campaigns will run for several months to ensure observations during and after the heat wave event. This way the impact of heat waves on ecosystems as well as the longer-term disturbance introduced by an individual heat wave will be captured. Heat waves develop in response to changes in Rossby wave dynamics and build-up of atmospheric blocking situations. The entire development of heat waves and dry periods takes several weeks, thus event-driven observation campaigns have a lead time of approximately 4 weeks. 

During the implementation phase from 2017 to 2021, first test campaigns will run under non-disturbed conditions to develop the operational procedures for heat waves and droughts. Focus areas for heat wave campaigns will be the well characterized TERENO sites of the Ammer catchment, Eifel and TERENO Northeast together with the research station DEMMIN. These sites provide the necessary base-line data, a full coverage of the research domain and the infrastructure to deploy mobile measurement systems at short notice.

observation systems
MOSES observation systems for Heat Waves. Soil and water quality module: functional microbiome changes measured by online metagenomics and metabolomics (1), buoy with multi-parameter sensors (2) and mobile mesocosms for water quality (3); land-atmosphere fluxes module: long-term quantification of GHG fluxes and their isotopic composition with stationary systems (5), event based quantification of GHG fluxes and their isotopic composition with mobile systems (7); atmospheric chemistry module: distribution of air pollutants measured on small drones (8) and a zeppelin (9); biota module: drones equipped with hyperspectral and IR sensors to characterize vegetation canopy (8); water balance module: soil moisture determination using mobile Cosmic Ray Sensors (4), gravimeters (6) and mobile hydrogeophysics to determine subsurface soil properties (10).