The excursion started with a road trip through the country, heading towards the North to the Etosha national park and afterwards back to the South to the Fish river canyon. We learned how the Welwitschia plant could survive in the desert, which animals live in this country and saw stunning images of the beautiful landscape.
After seeing the country, Roland Vogt, co-founder of meteoblue AG and researcher at the
University of Basel,
continued and provided insights into his work carried out at the Gobabeb Namib Research Institute.
Gobabeb is located in the Central Namib and a center of ecosystem research since 1962. It is also a research platform
supporting scientific activities from all over the world related to the desert environment.
Roland and his team have been doing their research in meteorology on different projects since 2009.
Among other things, he runs a BSRN
(Baseline Surface Radiation Network)
station together with Gobabeb and KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology). BSRN is a worldwide network of high-quality
radiation measuring stations, and Gobabeb is currently the only active one in Africa south of the equator.
A well-known regular weather pattern in the Namib Desert is fog (as seen in the picture). Its climatology is investigated with a network of 11 weather stations (FogNet) distributed at the coast and further inland of Central Namib. The fog life cycle is observed by measuring fog precipitation. In summary, fog is closely related to the occurrence of stratus clouds which are regularly transported inland. Where the stratus intercepts with the ascending terrain, fog occurs. Daily and seasonal stratus dynamics lead to a specific fog climatology, manifesting in a summer maximum of fog days inland and a winter maximum on the coast. Moreover, we learned about some “fancy” measurement devices, like a sun tracker.
Thanks for bringing us to this unique country.
