Basel | EPFL Graph Search

Basel (ˈbɑːzəl , ˈbaːzl̩), also known as Basle (bɑːl ), is a city in northwestern Switzerland on the river Rhine. Basel is Switzerland's third-most-populous city (after Zürich and Geneva), with 164,488 inhabitants within the city municipality limits. The official language of Basel is (the Swiss variety of Standard) German, but the main spoken language is the local Basel German dialect. Basel is commonly considered to be the cultural capital of Switzerland and the city is famous for its many museums, including the Kunstmuseum, which is the first collection of art accessible to the public in the world (1661) and the largest museum of art in Switzerland, the Fondation Beyeler (located in Riehen), the Museum Tinguely and the Museum of Contemporary Art, which is the first public museum of contemporary art in Europe. Forty museums are spread throughout the city-canton, making Basel one of the largest cultural centres in relation to its size and population in Europe. The University of Basel

Seismic vulnerability assessment at large scale city of Basel

Romain Savoy

The Basel region is one of the most seismically active regions in Switzerland. Already devastated by Nature in 1356, the city of Basel is now actively involved in assessing the seismic risk on its buildings in order to protect its patrimony and its population as effectively as possible. Through innovative assessment methods, researchers and scientists throughout Switzerland are working to effectively and accurately assess seismic risk through the three components that define it: hazard, exposure and vulnerability. It is this latter element that is addressed in this report. While the assessments carried out so far deal with the buildings one by one, an essential aspect of Basel's built environment is hidden in the row configurations of many buildings. Indeed, due to the desire to optimize space, many buildings are adjacent to each other, modifying thus their seismic behaviour. This document is therefore a first study of the vulnerability of building rows in order to reveal whether the effects of this particular configuration are beneficial or not. Thanks to epoch plans collected from the archives of the Canton of Basel-Stadt and dynamic simulations based on the Applied Element Method, the consequences on the vulnerability of two types of rows of masonry buildings are estimated. As a conclusion, the impact of introducing new fragility curves on the assessment of damage in the Iselin district makes it possible to highlight the effects of taking into account the row configuration of the buildings it contains.

2020

Un noeud de trafic densifié pour l'EuroAirport Basel Mulhouse Freiburg

Martin Wyss

Today's airports aren't anymore pure interfaces between ground and air. Since several years they are going through an intense development. Their ground and air accessibility attracts real estate development and (re-) links the region it is implemented in. The provoked economical development around the airport has impact on its catchment area and vice versa. The “EuroAirport Basel Mulhouse Freiburg” consists in an important regional airport, connecting its catchment area with Europe and is located at the borders of three countries. The present situation doesn't include any rail connection even though tracks pass by about a kilometer from the terminal. The only access is by road and air traffic. My project aims at an improved accessibility of the EuroAirport - connecting different scales at one place. This new DENSIFIED MODAL INTERCHANGE includes a reorganization of the terminal layout. The old terminal (1970) is demolished and this new void within the existing terminal (20012 - 2005) marks the interconnected modes of transportation and lets the passengers experience their flows. The project adds a high speed train (HST) station and a Ringbahn stop connecting the site to the bigger region and the city of Basel. The train station takes advantage of its location at the crossing of important European HST axes and allows the site to keep the amount of passengers even when its short haul flights will be substituted to HST to free up air space for long haul flights in the coming future.

2011

Improvement of an urban turbulence parametrization for meteorological operational forecast and air quality modeling

Clive Muller

During the last century, urban pollution has increased with the growth of cities. Urban air quality has become a high priority as it is directly linked to concerns such as human exposure and health. The present work is dedicated to urban air quality modeling with focus on urban meteorology. The main goal is to improve meteorological and air quality simulations in urban areas. Based on measurements and numerical air quality simulations, Chapter 3 describes the meteorological situation and tests an emission inventory for an ozone pollution episode in Mexico City (2 March 1997), in order to determine the principal factors to be accounted in an air quality study. The Mexico City case shows the great influence of meteorological conditions and pollutant emissions on air quality. A thorough understanding of the phenomena governing the meteorological conditions, like small scale convergence, and an accurate emission inventory validated by VOC measurements in the city, are sensitive elements in an air quality study. In Chapter 4, the presence of an Urban Heat Island (UHI) is underlined over the city of Basel (Switzerland) with the BUBBLE measurements. Further on, the ability of aLMo (the operational weather prediction model of MeteoSwiss) to reproduce the effect of a city on the boundary layer atmospheric flow fields is investigated. Results show that aLMo is not able to reproduce the UHI and hence that its surface scheme based on the Monin-Obukhov Similarity Theory (MOST) is not adapted for the urban areas. Therefore, the Buildings Effects Parametrization (BEP) which has been developed by Martilli et al.(2002) especially for urban areas, is implemented in aLMo. Results show that alMo is now able to reproduce the main behavior of the urban boundary layer as the UHI and BEP has hence a real enhancement potential for aLMo. Chapter 5 shows the sensitivity of aLMo with respect to its vertical resolution. In order to limit the sensitivity of aLMo to the grid resolution, BEP is modified. The mesoscale model furnishes the upper boundary conditions for the inner calculation of BEP. That is, BEP recalculates independently the vertical profiles of wind, temperature and energy based on the surface fluxes of momentum, heat and turbulent kinetic energy. The results obtained show a decrease in the sensitivity to the resolution and a better agreement with the measurements. Furthermore, the modified version of BEP gives additional meteorological fields (temperature, wind and TKE) in the urban canopy. The computed temperature in the urban canopy shows a good agreement with measurements in a Basel street canyon. This work shows that it is not necessary to have a high resolution for taking into account modification of the atmospheric flow fields induced by a city.

EPFL2007

Improvement of an urban turbulence parametrization for meteorological operational forecast and air quality modeling

Clive Muller

EPFL2007