Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics ACP Award 2025
At the 23rd Swiss Geoscience Meeting, held in Bern in December 2025, the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Award was presented to Hermenia Torell'o i Sentelles for her doctoral thesis “Exploring the effects of urban areas on the space time properties of heavy rainfall.” Her research investigates how cities of varying sizes and climatic settings modify precipitation patterns. Using remote-sensing data, particularly weather radar observa-tions, she analysed storm behaviour in space and time with a storm tracking algorithm. Building on these findings, she applied convection resolving numerical modelling to uncover the dynamic and thermodynamic mechanisms that drive the urban influence on extreme precipitation.
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Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics ACP Award 2024
At the Swiss Geoscience meeting in Basel in November 2024, the ACP Award for Atmospheric Research was presented to Dominique Rust for her PhD thesis “Verification of halogenated greenhouse gas emissions by regional atmospheric observations in Europe”. Her work covers a wide range of methods, from precision measurements of gases to statistical data analysis. The award committee was particularly impressed by one part of her thesis work: In a tracer-release experiment she could quantify emissions from a fluorocarbon industry cluster and could show that effective abatement measures do reduce HFC emissions.
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Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics ACP Award 2023
At the occasion of the Swiss Geoscience meeting in Mendrisio in November 2023, the ACP Award for Atmospheric Research was presented to Marina Friedel for her PhD thesis "The role of Arctic ozone in forcing Northern Hemispheric climate". Her work shows that the springtime Arctic ozone depletion causes surface anomalies across the Northern Hemisphere on both seasonal and multi-decadal timescales. Her results were recognised in the summary report of the 2022 WMO/UNEP Ozone Assessment.
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At the occasion of the Swiss Geoscience meeting in Lausanne in November 2022, the ACP Award for Atmospheric Research was presented to Lea Beusch for her PhD thesis ‘MESMER – A Modular Earth System Model Emulator with Spatially Resolved Output’. In her thesis, she developed a regional Earth System Model (ESM) emulator, which is able to emulate the output of geographically-resolved ESMs, based on a given global temperature input. Lea Beusch demonstrated how MESMER can be used to recombine global and regional features of ESMs to cover a larger phase space with the emulator, potentially including observational constraints.
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At the occasion of the virtual Swiss Geoscience meeting in Geneva in November 2021, the ACP Award for Atmospheric Research was presented to Kristýna Kantnerová for her PhD thesis “Analysis of clumped isotopes of nitrous oxide: method development and first applications”. Her work shows an impressive thematic depth, ranging from several essential instrumental and methodological developments in the field of greenhouse gas isotope analysis to the interpretation of fingerprints of major source / sink processes.
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Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics ACP Award 2020
At the occasion of the virtual Swiss Geoscience meeting in Zurich in November 2019, the ACP Award for Atmospheric Research was presented to Aryeh Feinberg for his PhD thesis “The atmospheric sulfur and selenium cycles: a global model of transport and deposition”. The award committee was particular impressed by the broad spectrum of the work, covering model development, evaluation and application to investigate the evolution of Selenium cycle with climate change.
Image : Ulrich Krieger