Introduction to CAPAC

More than half of the world’s population lives in cities. This percentage is still increasing, and even more people will live in artificial environments whose characteristics are different from natural or rural areas. Especially in mega-cities like Cairo, the life quality of the inhabitants can be dramatically altered. This fact makes the urban climatology an important field for environmental research.

The city of Cairo was chosen because of its unique location: Situated in a hot and dry climate and nonetheless partly surrounded by agriculture, a variety of different rural and urban microclimates are evolving. This spatial heterogeneity asks for a process-oriented approach that accounts for the climatic differences in the spatial domain.

Hence, the first phase of CAPAC was dedicated to the understanding of the urban energy balance in Cairo through measurements at ground stations and from satellites in space. The in situ measurements provided a focussed insight in carefully chosen microclimates and provided at the same time ground truth data for the satellite images, which expand our acquired knowledge into the spatial domain.

CAPAC is a project of the Institute of Meteorology, Climatology and Remote Sensing (MCRLab) of the University of Basel, Switzerland. It is funded by the Swiss National Funds. It started April, 1. 2006 (no joke) and ended in June 2010.

Team (alphabetical):
Omar Ateya, Susanne Burri, Corinne Frey, Maha Harhash, Prof. Dr. Eberhard Parlow, Hans-Ruedi Ruegg, Metwally Tarad, Dr. Roland Vogt, Prof. Magdy Wahab.

Contact person for more information or questions: Corinne Frey