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We love holidays on the beach and about a quarter of the world's population live on coasts because of the favourable economic location. But until now we have had only a very vague picture of how coastal areas have evolved worldwide over the years. Scientists in Delft are changing this. Researchers from Deltares, Delft University of Technology and IHE have analysed changes in 50,000 beaches over a 35-year period. They present their findings today in Nature Scientific Reports.

Prof. Nick van de Giesen received an IBM Technology & Data grant in the form of free super computing power and weather data. The project of Prof. Van de Giesen and Camille le Coz (both from the Water Management department) focusses on the simulation of rainfall and weather data in Africa to increase farmer resilience.

Access to safe drinking water is a global challenge, particularly affecting the rural poor in developing countries. This urgent problem requires new, smart solutions for the removal of a wide range of contaminants of global concern, such as arsenic, fluoride, pathogens and antibiotic resistant genes.

Prof.dr.ir. Mark van Koningsveld has been installed as the new holder of the chair of Ports & Waterways. Van Koningsveld is taking over from prof. Ir. Tiedo Vellinga and will continue the chair’s main brief which is to conduct research into the areas of port infrastructure and design and nautical matters.

A Dutch-Texan team found that most Houston-area drowning deaths from Hurricane Harvey occurred outside the zones designated by government as being at higher risk of flooding: the 100- and 500-year floodplains. Harvey, one of the costliest storms in US history, hit southeast Texas on 25 August 2017 causing unprecedented flooding and killing dozens. Researchers at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and Rice University in Texas published their results today in the European Geosciences Union journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences.

The department of Geoscience & Engineering is part of EPOS-NL, the Dutch contribution to the European infrastructure for geosciences, natural hazards and geo-resources. This project is one of the ten awarded proposals in the National Roadmap for Large-Scale Scientific Infrastructure by NWO.

‘Weather’ is the result of a combination of many diverse factors, such as solar radiation, the concentration of greenhouse gases, air quality and humidity, local building density or vegetation, wind direction and a whole host of underlying physical and chemical processes.