Category Archives: Events

The educational programme for the Aeolus satellite mission excited the students of Rhodes.

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With the completion of 4.5 years since the launch of the Aeolus satellite, the European Space Agency (ESA), in collaboration with the National Observatory of Athens (NOA) and the high-tech company Raymetrics, co-organised the closing conference "Aeolus 2023" of the flagship mission in Rhodes (22-26 May 2023). World-renowned scientists from European remote sensing centers, NASA and JAXA, met with the managers of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) to draw conclusions on the contribution of Aeolus wind data to the accuracy of weather forecasts.

In this context, members of the Department of Geology and Geoenvironment of the University of Athens and the NOA - ReACT team of the National Observatory of Athens, with the support of the ESA - European Space Agency education office and the Greek ESERO office, designed and implemented, for the first time, an innovative educational programme, the "Aeolus EDU" for the Aeolus satellite mission.

150 students (6th grade) from the 1st, 12th and 13th Primary Schools of Rhodes participated in the educational programme, at the Rodos Palace Hotel, on Wednesday 24 May 2023. Aeolus EDU is an active learning program that focuses on the interaction of students with wind measuring instruments and hands-on experiments related to the physics’ principles behind the "Doppler Wind Lidar" technology used for monitoring the wind from space.

Students had the opportunity to learn what causes winds, what ground-based instruments we use to monitor wind, why the Aeolus satellite mission is so important and what innovative technologies the satellite uses to monitor winds globally and continuously from space. Finally, the students had the opportunity to meet and converse with Tommaso Parrinello and Thorsten Fehr - the Aeolus mission manager and the head of the ESA Atmospheric Section- who were impressed by the students’ enthusiasm.

The programme was designed and implemented with the help of the following persons:

- Panagiota Asimakopoulou (PhD candidate of the Department of Geology and Geoenvironment of the University of Athens and member of the Laboratory of Climatology and Atmospheric Environment - (LACAE) and the Remote Sensing Laboratory - (RSLab-NKUA)

-Maria Tsichla, Ioanna Tsikoudi, Peristera Paschou, Olympia Vasardani and Stavroula Papatheochari (associate researchers and PhD candidates at the National Observatory of Athens, and members of the NOA - ReACT team)

 

This programme would not have been possible without the support of:

LACAE at the Athens Science Festival 2017

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“Shaping our future” is the theme this year for the Athens Science Festival 2017.

For a 3rd year in a row, LACAE will participate in the Technopolis event from 29th  March to the 2nd of April 2017.  You can find us there on Wednesday – Friday from 09:00 till 14:00 and  Saturday – Sunday from 11:00 to 16:00.

The LACAE team, ‘meteorologists in action’,  has prepared spectacular experiments that will give you the chance to create a tornado into a bottle, inflate balloons without getting tired, make your own clouds and realize the greenhouse effect by using simple materials. You will also have the opportunity to become a meteorologist, forecasting the weather for the following day and of course play many Meteo-games where the winner is decided by the weather.

Visitors wondering about satellites and  earth observation, how they impact our lives and the way they shape our future, will have the chance to answer their questions and find out what the European Union through the Copernicus programme offers to the European citizens.  LACAE people, members of  CAN-HelP (Copernicus Academy Network of Hellenic Partners) will present how Copernicus satellites (Sentinels 1-6) provide free and open data and services that improve the quality of our life.

You are welcome to come interact, play, learn and get to know us!

LACAE co-organizes the MEDCLIVAR 2016 Conference in Athens, from 26-30 September

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The Laboratory of Climatology and Atmospheric Environment(LACAE) of the National and Kapodistrian university of Athens, in collaboration with the National Observatory of Athens, the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research and the Mariolopoulos – Kanaginis Fountation for the Environmental Sciences, co-organizes the MedCLIVAR 2016 conference.
The Conference will be held from 26 to 30 September 2016 at the University of Athens, main building (PROPYLAEA-University of Athens, 30 Panepistimiou Str.), located in the Athens city centre.

It is  the fourth conference in a series organized by MedCLIVAR, following MedCLIVAR2011 (Lecce, Italy), MedCLIVAR2012 (Madrid, Spain), MedCLIVAR2014 (Ankara, Turkey).
This sequence of conferences is fundamental for the mission of MedCLIVAR which aims to promote better communication among different scientific disciplines and to develop a multidisciplinary vision of the evolution of the Mediterranean climate through studies that integrate atmospheric, marine, and terrestrial climate components at time scales ranging from paleoreconstructions to future climate scenarios.
Visit MedCLIVAR 2016 conference site