News and Events

A recent article in 20 Minuten discusses how Switzerland's current drought compares with historic events such as 1947, 1976, 2003, and 2018. It explores the impacts of prolonged heat and water scarcity, highlights lessons from past extremes, and explains why droughts are expected to become more frequent and severe in a warming climate. (Picture: Firefighters in Regensdorf, Canton of Zurich, tried to save the harvest. ETH Library)

Interested in the topic? Read here Nomei Imfeld's paper for a more in-depth perspective.

Floriane Gabriel started as a PhD student on July 1^st, 2026 in the Urban Climate Group. Following her work during her master’s thesis, she focuses on the public perception of urban thermal comfort and that of different heat mitigation projects. She studies the comparison between this subjective perception and the objective data measured in Zürich. She finished her master’s in Climate Science earlier in 2026 where she also wrote her thesis in the urban climate group focusing on the city of Lausanne.

Bern is suffering from the heat wave. Temperatures exceeded 40 °C for the first time in Bern’s urban climate monitoring network (LinkedIn), and the temperature of the Aare broke the all-time record as early as June (Berner Zeitung). In line with this, Duncan Pappert and Olivia Romppainen explain the circulation patterns that lead to prolonged heat waves (Paper).

Looking for an impactful research opportunity in transdisciplinary climate science? The Climatology group of the Institute of Geography and Oeschger Centre, University of Bern, led by Prof. Stefan Brönnimann announces an open PhD position in Urban Heat in a Changing Climate in the framework of the SNF program NCCR CLIM+ (https://www.nccr-climplus.ch/).

For more info klick here.

Where does Switzerland stand in addressing climate change? The latest report from the Swiss Academies of Sciences (SCNAT), in collaboration with the Institute of Geography, provides answers to this question.

The hot and dry European summer of 1540 with its extreme impacts is well known. It marked the culmination of an 11-month drought and of a very dry decade, dwarfing the heat summer of 2003 in terms of anomalies. Few people know that the summer of 1590 was even hotter, but fell into a generally cold an rainy decade. Consequences were much less severe. In a paper in "Scientific Reports", Laura Lipfert analyses these and other hot European summers of the last 600 years and places future extreme summers into the context of past anomalies.

As a climate scientist, Patrick Bigler has developed a measuring tower for urban temperature measurements in Bern. And as a trained metal worker, he builds the tower himself.

(to the Article)

Daily weather reconstruction for Europe are possible for periods more than 200 years back. Using the example of the "heat summer of 1807", Peter Stucki compared nine different approaches - numerical, statistical, machine learning - for daily temperature and pressure reconstructions. The paper is highlighted in "Climate of the Past".

Anja Netzle joined the Climatology Group on 2 February as a junior assistant. She is currently completing her bachelor’s thesis in the UrbanLab of the Urban City Group, where she investigates public perceptions of the Viererfeld area in Bern. Her work at the GIUB will be managing the Colloquium Atmosphere, Climate and Earth observation as well as various administrative tasks and supporting the High Resolution Temperature  Network in Bern, Biel and Thun.