Publications related to Sensitivity of Alpine3D modeled snow cover to modifications in DEM resolution, station coverage and meteorological input quantities

At what spatial scale does natural selection operate? Using multiscale frameworks to calibrate the effects of environmental factors across landscape continuums

Patterns in nature arise from processes interacting across a continuum of spatial scales, where new relationships emerge at each level of investigation. These patterns are nested features encompassing fine-scale local patterns, such as topography and geolo ...

EPFL2024

A seasonal snowpack model forced with dynamically downscaled forcing data resolves hydrologically relevant accumulation patterns

Michael Lehning, Tobias Jonas, Dylan Stewart Reynolds

The Mountain snowpack stores months of winter precipitation at high elevations, supplying snowmelt to lowland areas in drier seasons for agriculture and human consumption worldwide. Accurate seasonal predictions of the snowpack are thus of great importance ...

Frontiers Media Sa2024

Multiscale Very High Resolution Topographic Models in Alpine Ecology: Pros and Cons of Airborne LiDAR and Drone-Based Stereo-Photogrammetry Technologies

Stéphane Joost, Aude Rogivue, Estelle Rochat, Kevin Leempoel, Annie Sandrine Guillaume

The vulnerability of alpine environments to climate change presses an urgent need to accurately model and understand these ecosystems. Popularity in the use of digital elevation models (DEMs) to derive proxy environmental variables has increased over the p ...

2021

Potential and uncertainty of wind energy in the Swiss Alps

Albertus Christiaan Kruyt

Switzerland has committed itself to an ambitious energy strategy. It aims to replace the exist- ing nuclear generation capacity with predominantly indigenous renewable resources. Wind power could play a significant role in this transition, yet the wind res ...

EPFL2019

A graph signal filtering-based approach for detection of different edge types on airborne lidar data

Elif Vural, Eda Bayram

Airborne Laser Scanning is a well-known remote sensing technology, which provides a dense and highly accurate, yet unorganized point cloud of earth surface. During the last decade, extracting information from the data generated by airborne LiDAR systems ha ...

2017

Hydrological Processes in a High Alpine Watershed

Raphaël Mutzner

Alpine hydrology is particularly challenging due to the complexity of mountainous terrain and the spatial and temporal variability of meteorological parameters such as precipitation, temperature and evaporation. Yet improving our understanding of hydrologi ...

EPFL2015

Multi-scale landscape genomic models : the role of very high resolution digital elevation models in evolutionary biology

Kevin Leempoel

Environmental heterogeneity is one of the main actors of biodiversity and species adaptation as it exerts a selective pressure on observable characteristics of living organisms. Consequently, local adaptation favours certain genetic variants and, by doing ...

EPFL2015

Very high resolution digital elevation models: are multi-scale derived variables ecologically relevant?

Stéphane Joost, Pascal Vittoz, Kevin Leempoel

Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) are often used in landscape ecology to retrieve elevation or first derivative terrain attributes such as slope or aspect in the context of species distribution modelling. However, DEM-derived variables are scale-dependent an ...

Wiley-Blackwell2015

Elevation dependency of mountain snow depth

Michael Lehning

Elevation strongly affects quantity and distribution patterns of precipitation and snow. Positive elevation gradients were identified by many studies, usually based on data from sparse precipitation stations or snow depth measurements. We present a systema ...

Copernicus Gesellschaft Mbh2014

Statistical modelling of the snow depth distribution in open alpine terrain

Michael Lehning

The spatial distribution of alpine snow covers is characterised by large variability. Taking this variability into account is important for many tasks including hydrology, glaciology, ecology or natural hazards. Statistical modelling is frequently applied ...

European Geosciences Union2013

Improved interpolation of meteorological forcings and hydrologic implications for a Swiss alpine region

Marc Parlange, Alexis Berne, Cara Christine Tobin, Andrea Rinaldo, Ludovico Nicotina

This paper presents a comparative study on the mapping of temperature and precipitation fields in complex Alpine terrain. Its relevance hinges on the major impact that inadequate interpolations of meteorological forcings bear on the accuracy of hydrologic ...

2011