Nighttime cooling of an urban pond

One of the processes by which open water cools the air during hot summer days is by storing the heat and increasing its own temperature. This heat is then released at night. The aim of this paper is to analyze this cooling process by quantifying the magnitude of turbulent, latent and sensible, heat fluxes in comparison to radiative and ground...

HESS Opinions: Science in today's media landscape - Challenges and lessons from hydrologists and journalists

Media such as television, newspapers and social media play a key role in the communication between scientists and the general public. Communicating your science via the media can be positive and rewarding by providing the inherent joy of sharing your knowledge with a broader audience, promoting science as a fundamental part of culture and...

Uchimizu: A Cool(ing) Tradition to Locally Decrease Air Temperature

The urban heat island effect was first described 200 years ago, but the development of ways to mitigate heat in urban areas reaches much further into the past. Uchimizu is a 17th century Japanese tradition, in which water is sprinkled around houses to cool the ground surface and air by evaporation. Unfortunately, the number of published studies...

Skin effect of fresh water measured using distributed temperature sensing

A phenomenon known as the skin effect-a layer of surface water that is colder than the water beneath it-was previously described in oceanography and verified in lab measurements. Only a few measurements have been done on the skin effect in field conditions, and therefore this phenomenon is relatively unknown. This paper presents measurements...

Reporting negative results to stimulate experimental hydrology: discussion of “The role of experimental work in hydrological sciences–insights from a community survey”^*

Experimental work in hydrology is in decline. Based on a community survey, Blume et al. showed that the hydrological community associates experimental work with greater risks. One of the main issues with experimental work is the higher chance of negative results (defined here as when the expected or wanted result was not observed despite careful...

Do green roofs cool the air?

Rapid urbanization and an increasing number and duration of heat waves poses a need to mitigate extremely high temperatures. One of the repeatedly suggested measures to moderate the so called urban heat island are green roofs. This study investigates several extensive sedum-covered green roofs in Utrecht (NL) and their effect on air...

Practical considerations for enhanced-resolution coil-wrapped distributed temperature sensing

Fibre optic distributed temperature sensing (DTS) is widely applied in Earth sciences. Many applications require a spatial resolution higher than that provided by the DTS instrument. Measurements at these higher resolutions can be achieved with a fibre optic cable helically wrapped on a cylinder. The effect of the probe construction, such as its...

Practical considerations for enhanced-resolution coil-wrapped Distributed Temperature Sensing (discussion)

Fibre optic Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) is widely applied in earth sciences. Many applications require a spatial resolution higher than the provided by the DTS instrument. Measurements at these higher resolutions can be achieved with a fibre optic cable helically wrapped on a cylinder. The effect of the probe construction, such as its...

Thermal behaviour of an urban lake during summer

Water as a coolant of the city