ETH Zurich

The group of Hydrology and Water Resources Management (Prof. Paolo Burlando and Prof. Peter Molnar) focuses on teaching and research activities in the field of surface water hydrology and water resources management. Key activities are the analysis and modelling of hydrological processes, their importance in catchments, and their interactions with human and environmental systems, with the aim of providing the basis for modern water resources assessment and sustainable planning and management.

The group of Subsurface Environmental Processes (Dr. Joaquin Jimenez-Martinez) quantifies the links between the physical heterogeneity of subsurface environments, including porous and fractured media, the heterogeneity of the resulting flow fields, and the effective transport behavior, including solute dispersion, mixing, and (bio-)chemical reactions. The group is associated to the chair of Groundwater and Hydrodynamics (Prof. Roman Stocker)

The main objective of the Climate and Water Cycle group (Prof. Christoph Schär) is to improve the understanding of the climate system and its interactions with the water cycle on time-scales from one day to 100 years. The mission is to better understand the underlying mechanisms, trends, variations and extremes; and to improve the predictive capabilities and exploitation of weather and climate models. 

The group of Land-Climate Dynamics (Prof. Sonia Seneviratne) focuses on the investigation of land-climate interactions and feedbacks, climate change and climate extremes, including drought-climate feedbacks. They use several modelling tools, including regional and global climate models as well as land surface models and statistical data analyses.

The group Physics of Environmental Systems (Prof. James Kirchner) explores environmental systems, often using approaches developed in physics.  Environmental systems often encompass physical processes and material properties that are complex, heterogeneous on all scales, and poorly characterized by direct measurement.

The group Physics of Soils and Terrestrial Ecosystems (Prof. Andrea Carminati) studies the pivotal role of soil in environmental systems and the effects of soil water on plant water relations and droughts. 

The group Engineering Geology (Prof. Jordan Aaron) studies fundamental questions related to the formation and hydro-thermo-mechanical properties of fractured rocks from the laboratory to site scales and applies experimental and numerical tools to understand of important questions related to landslide hazards, deep excavations, waste disposal and geothermal energy.

The research interests of the Geothermal Energy and Geofluids group (Prof. Martin Saar) are in geophysical fluid dynamics of subsurface multiscale, multiphase, multicomponent, reactive fluid (groundwater, hydrocarbon, CO2) and energy (heat, pressure) transport, such as water- and CO2-based geothermal energy utilization, geologic CO2 storage, grid-scale energy storage, enhanced oil recovery, and groundwater flow.