Alps
The CIPRA compact “Energy” provides an overview on energy use and energy production in the Alps and describes national and regional strategies for climate protection and climate adaptation. Here CIPRA gives its central statement on this issue: if we want to stem earth warming, increasing efficiency is important but not sufficient: we must reduce our consumption of energy services. Renewable...
This CIPRA compact presents an overview of transport-related measures in the Alps to ameliorate climate change and promote adaptations to climate change. The second chapter explains CIPRA's key concerns: Without any change to our mobility behaviour, we will not attain the climate goals! On the one hand, automobile transport must become more expensive, and on the other, transport types benign...
This paper analyses the hydrological functioning of the Bange-L’Eau-Morte karstic system using classical and original techniques, recession curves, correlation and spectral analyses, noise analysis and wavelet analyses. The main characteristics that can be deduced are the recession coefficients, the dynamic volume of storage, the response time of the...
Shadows cast by the mountains themselves have a strong influence on the surface energy balance of mountainous regions. If the influence of shadows is to be included on sub-grid scales in a surface energy balance model, a statistical representation has to be used. Slope components calculated from digital elevation models of areas in North Wales and the French Alps are...
Global climate change affects spatial and temporal patterns of precipitation and so has a major impact on surface and subsurface water balances. While global climate models are designed to describe climate change on global or continental scales, their resolution is too coarse for them to be suitable for describing regional climate change. Therefore, regional climate...
Mountain regions supply a large share of the world’s population with fresh water. Quantification of the hydrological significance of mountains, however, is subject to great uncertainty. Instead of focusing on global averages in advance, the present analysis follows a catchment-based approach using discharge data provided by the Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC)....
Rainfall-runoff response in temperate humid headwater catchments is mainly controlled by hydrological processes at the hillslope scale. Applied tracer experiments with fluorescent dye and salt tracers are well known tools in groundwater studies at the large scale and vadose zone studies at the plot scale, where they provide a means to characterise subsurface flow. The...
The European Alps rely on winter precipitation for various needs in terms of hydropower and other water uses. Major European rivers originate from the Alps and depend on winter precipitation and the consequent spring snow melt for their summer base flows. Understanding the fluctuations in winter rainfall in this region is crucially important to the study of changes...
Mountainous soil erosion processes were investigated in the Urseren Valley (Central Switzerland) by means of measurements and simulations. The quantification of soil erosion was performed on hill slope scale (2·20 m) for three different land use types: hayfields, pastures with dwarf shrubs and pastures without dwarf shrubs with three replicates each. Erosion...
Digital elevation models of Gepatschferner in Northern Tyrol, Austria were obtained with digital photogrammetry from high altitude stereo photo pairs and by digitising an analogue topographic glacier map, for 1990 and 1971, respectively. A difference map was calculated to identify regions of glacier elevation increases and decreases corresponding to glacier mass gain and loss. While the...
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