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High waves startle mangroves for days during an experiment at the Delta wave flume in Delft. Researchers from Deltares and TU Delft keep increasing the force on the trees. They test how strong the mangrove trees are under extreme wave conditions and what contribution they make to water safety.

Ir. Hoessein Alkisaei has been awarded an NWO Mozaïek 2.0 grant. Mozaïek 2.0 is a doctoral fellowship program aimed at graduates with a migration background from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Turkey who are underrepresented in the Netherlands.

Can salt marshes serve as a natural solution for flood protection? Researchers of the project ‘Living Dikes’ transported 62 big blocks of salt marshes, containing soil and vegetation, from the coast of Friesland to the Delta Flume at Deltares. After four weeks of exposure to extreme waves, almost the entire salt marsh is still standing there.

Susan Steele-Dunne has been awarded a NWO Vici grant. She will explore how to monitor the pulse of the Earth’s ecosystems using radar observations. Variations in radar observations from a forest during a day can reveal early warning signs of declining health conditions of a forest. An improved understanding of these processes will allow us to make better predictions of how ecosystems will respond to respond to climate change. In the long term, it may even offer opportunities for early interventions.

Cumulus clouds over land start to disappear almost instantly during a partial solar eclipse. Until recently, satellite measurements during the eclipse resulted in dark spots in the cloud map, but researchers from TU Delft and KNMI were able to recover the satellite measurements by using a new method. The results may have implications for proposed climate engineering ideas, because disappearing clouds can partly oppose the cooling effect of artificial solar eclipses. The results were published today in Nature Communications Earth and Environment.