
Ulrich LeopoldLuxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) | LIST · Environmental Research & Innovation (ERIN)
Ulrich Leopold
M.Sc. Physical Geography, Ph.D. equivalent
About
66
Publications
18,804
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1,638
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
June 2014 - present
Position
- FP7 ITN Marie Curie QUICS - Quantifying Uncertainty in Integrated Catchment Studies - WP leader
Description
- The aim of the QUICS project is to provide high level training and carry out research to take the implementation of the Water Framework Directive to the next level by assessing the uncertainty of integrated catchment water quality model predictions.
Publications
Publications (66)
The iGuess4ESTIMUM platform is based on the geospatial software technology framework iGuess® a software technology aiming at enhancing GeoSimulation, GeoAnalytics and Policy decisions in different aspects of urban planning. The iGuess4ESTIMUM platform was required to access geospatial data published by different cities, organizations, public portal...
Urbanization is leading us to a more chaotic state where healthy living becomes a prime concern. The high-rise buildings influence the urban setting with a high shadow rate on surroundings that can have no positive impact on the general neighborhood. Nevertheless, shadows are the main factor of defeatist virtual settings, they are expensive to rend...
Uncertainty in urban drainage modelling studies presents challenges to decision makers with limited investment resources attempting to achieve regulatory compliance for intermittent discharges from Combined Sewer Overflows. This paper presents the development of a new decision-making approach to address two key challenges encountered when attemptin...
Uncertainty is often ignored in urban water systems modelling. Commercial software used in engineering practice often ignores the uncertainties of input variables and their propagation because of a lack of user-friendly implementations. This can have serious consequences, such as the wrong dimensioning of urban drainage systems (UDSs) and the inacc...
Uncertainty is often ignored in urban water systems modelling. Commercial software used in engineering practice often ignores uncertainties of input variables and their propagation because of a lack of user-friendly implementations. This can have serious consequences, such as the wrong dimensioning of urban drainage systems (UDS) and the inaccurate...
Reducing the energy consumption of buildings is a priority for carbon emissions mitigation in urban areas. Building stock energy models have been developed to support decisions of public authorities in renovation strategies. However, the burdens of renovation interventions and their temporal distribution are mostly overlooked, leading to potential...
The challenge of this study is to investigate on applicability of a data-driven Gaussian Process Emulator (GPE) technique to develop a surrogate model for a computationally expensive and detailed urban drainage simulator. The novelty is the consideration of (short) time series for the simulation inputs and outputs. Such simulation setup is interest...
In this paper, we address the curse of dimensionality and scalability issues while managing vast volumes of multidimensional raster data in the renewable energy modeling process in an appropriate spatial and temporal context. Tensor representation provides a convenient way to capture inter-dependencies along multiple dimensions. In this direction,...
Urban drainage modelling typically requires development of highly detailed simulators due to the nature of various underlying surface and drainage processes, which makes them computationally too expensive. Application of such simulators is still challenging in activities such as real-time control (RTC), uncertainty quantification analysis or model...
In this study, applicability of a data-driven Gaussian Process Emulator (GPE) technique to develop a dynamic surrogate model for a computationally expensive urban drainage simulator is investigated. Considering rainfall time series as the main driving force is a challenge in this regard due to the high dimensionality problem. However, this problem...
Integrated Environmental Models (IEMs) incorporating ecosystem services (ES) can be useful tools to support the decision-making. However, their successful application strongly depends upon the confidence decision-makers can place in their outputs. Uncertainty analysis (UA), including uncertainty location, identification, characterization, treatment...
Understanding the energy cost structure of wastewater treatment plants is a relevant topic for plant managers due to the high energy costs and significant saving potentials. Currently, energy cost models are generally generated using logarithmic, exponential or linear functions that could produce not accurate results when the relationship between v...
The high-frequency on-line measurements coming from sensors installed in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) can be used for alert systems and decision support tools. Given the complexity of WWTPs, many authors developed efficient techniques for plant assessment. By contrast, few contributions are focussed on the identification of regime shifts in...
Integrated environmental modelling requires coupling sub-models at different spatial and temporal scales, thus accounting for change of support procedures (aggregation and disaggregation). We introduce the R-package spatio-temporal Uncertainty Propagation across multiple scales, stUPscales, which constitutes a contribution to state-of-the-art open...
Many complex urban drainage quality models are computationally expensive. Complexity and computing times may become prohibitive when these models are used in a Monte Carlo (MC) uncertainty analysis of long time series, in particular for practitioners. Computationally scalable and fast “surrogate” models may reduce the overall computation time for p...
Full-text view-only version: http://rdcu.be/Ig25.
The increasing complexity of urban planning projects today requires new approaches to better integrate stakeholders with different professional backgrounds throughout a city. Traditional tools used in urban planning are designed for experts and offer little opportunity for participation and collab...
p>Integrated environmental modelling requires coupling sub-models at different spatial and temporal scales, thus accounting for change of support procedures (aggregation and disaggregation). We introduce the R-package spatio-temporal Uncertainty Propagation across multiple scales, stUPscales, which constitutes a contribution to state-of-the-art ope...
Studies and publications from the past ten years demonstrate that generally the energy efficiency of Waste Water Treatment Plants (WWTPs) is unsatisfactory. In this domain, efficient pump energy management can generate economic and environmental benefits. Although the availability of on-line sensors can provide high-frequency information about pump...
Common practice in urban drainage modelling requires high temporal and spatial resolution of data inputs as land use, rainfall and runoff. In the case of rainfall input, the fast response to rainfall over small catchments has a direct effect on the temporal scale required to simulate with a good accuracy the hydrological and hydraulic dynamics proc...
Common practice in urban drainage modelling requires high temporal and spatial resolution of data inputs as land use, rainfall and runoff. In the case of rainfall input, the fast response to rainfall over small catchments has a direct effect on the temporal scale required to simulate with a good accuracy the hydrological and hydraulic dynamics proc...
Buildings are responsible for 40% of total final energy consumptions in Europe. Numerous bottom-up models were recently developed to support local authorities in assessing the energy consumption of large building stocks and reduction potentials. However, current models rarely consider uncertainty associated to building usage and characteristics wit...
In Waste Water Treatment Plants (WWTPs), the pump systems are one of the most energy intensive processes. An efficient energy management of pumps should produce environmental and economic benefits. In this paper, we propose a daily data-driven approach for a detailed pump efficiency analysis that reduces the time gap between an inefficiency and its...
Buildings are responsible for a large share of the energy consumption and environmental impacts worldwide. An assessment of the energy demand and environmental performance of building stocks at large spatial scales is increasingly needed for decision support in sustainable planning and policy making. While current bottom-up building stock models ma...
Development of a Time Series Analysis Toolbox for ESA Earth Observation Products and integrate with ESA’s Mission exploitation platform to provide a selection of univariate and multivariate time-series analysis methods for Proba-V and Copernicus imagery.
Waste Water Treatment Plants (WWTPs) are generally considered energy intensive. Substantial energy saving potentials have been identified by several authors. Pumps consume around 12% of the overall WWTP energy consumption. In this paper we propose a methodology that uses the sensors commonly installed in WWTPs, such as volume and energy sensors, to...
Precipitation is the most active flux and major input of hydrological systems. Precipitation controls hydrological states (soil moisture and groundwater level), and fluxes (runoff, evapotranspiration and groundwater recharge).
Hence, precipitation plays a paramount role in urban water systems. It controls the fluxes towards combined sewer tanks and...
Demolition waste represents a significant portion of the total generated waste and has a high importance from both a waste management and a resource efficiency perspective. The urban context is highly relevant to assess the environmental impact of the end-of-life stage of buildings and potential for future reduction to properly design corresponding...
Uncertainty is often ignored in urban hydrology modelling. Engineering practice typically ignores uncertainties and uncertainty propagation. This can have large impacts, such as the wrong dimensioning of urban drainage systems and the inaccurate estimation of pollution in the environment caused by combined sewer overflows. This paper presents an un...
Uncertainty is often ignored in urban hydrology modelling. Engineering practice typically ignores uncertainties and uncertainty propagation. This can have large impacts, such as the wrong dimensioning of urban drainage systems and the inaccurate estimation of pollution in the environment caused by combined sewer overflows. This paper presents an un...
Uncertainty is often ignored in urban hydrology modelling. Engineering practice typically ignores uncertainties and uncertainty propagation. This can have large impacts, such as the wrong dimensioning of urban drainage systems and the inaccurate estimation of pollution in the environment caused by combined sewer overflows. This paper presents an un...
Due to the rapidly increasing percentage of the population living in urban centres, there is a need to focus on the energy demand of these cities and the use of renewable energies instead of fossil fuels. In this paper, we develop a spatial model to determine the potential per parcel for using shallow geothermal energy, for space heating and hot wa...
This paper introduces an uncertainty analysis framework in urban drainage modelling and focuses on the application of the EmiStat model which simulates the volume and substance flows in urban drainage systems (UDS). EmiStat aids the planning and design of UDS without the requirement of extensive simulation tools. An implementation of EmiStat as an...
Cities play a key role in the mitigation of carbon emission, however there is a need for comprehensive tools able to support sustainable urban planning. The Smart City Energy platform powered by the web-based framework iGUESS® is a geospatial platform for decision support giving access to a series of calculation modules and providing visualization...
The complexity of urban projects today requires new approaches to integrate stakeholders with different professional backgrounds. Traditional tools used in urban planning are designed for experts and offer little opportunity for participation and collaborative design. This paper introduces the concept of Geospatial Tangible User Interfaces (GTUI),...
Energy retrofit of buildings represents an important sector for mobilizing investments to address carbon mitigation of cities. The identification of the actual energy consumption profile of large building stocks is a necessary step to evaluate the impact of retrofit measures, e.g. energy savings, at city scale.
The present study introduces a bottom...
This paper presents a methodology to model spatial uncertainties associated to the disaggregation of sectoral emission allocation in Luxembourg. We apply it to the integrated Luxembourg Energy Air Quality assessment model for the urban and regional scale. National aggregated sectoral emissions of primary air pollutants are computed by an energy mod...
Evaluation of soil functionality in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has progressively gained importance, although only a small cluster of studies deliver detailed guidelines on how to calculate quantified indicators. In addition, there is a lack of bibliography assessing impacts on the pedosphere due to spatially differentiated land use changes (LUC)....
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* An introduction to the challenges facing urban areas and the urgent need to make them more sustainable.
* A key challenge is the complexity of cities that leads to non-linear and unintended consequences of, often well meant, interventions.
* Underlines the case for a more integrated response to deliver more sustainable urban areas, and the...
Cities are responsible for about 70% of the overall primary energy consumption in Europe and play a major role in addressing carbon mitigation. In this respect, the housing sector has been identified as a key sector for its high energy savings potential achievable by implementing retrofit measures. However, a detailed characterization of the housin...
The housing sector has a significant energy savings potential achievable by retrofitting, however overheating might become a drawback in summer especially under the effect of climate change and urban heat island and should be properly considered in sustainable urban plans. This study aims at estimating the combined effect of retrofit measures on he...
As a consequence of the repeated and widespread use of pesticides in agriculture, pesticide soil residues can be informative tracers of the spatial distribution of soil properties or of the application history. Atrazine, desethylatrazine and terbutylazine soil residues were measured in ninety-six soil samples taken on seventy-one contiguous fields...
Cities are a major focus for the reduction of CO2 emissions. This requires the development of innovative strategies involving all activity sectors and putting these into practice by policies, actions and measures. Questions cities would like to answer are: What are the impacts of concrete policies or innovative projects regarding CO2 emissions?
The...
The integrated Geospatial Urban Energy Information & Support System (iGUESS) is currently being developed as part of an EU project to reduce CO2emissions in five European cities. The project is intended to create a decision support platform providing access to distributed data sources and analysis and modelling tools through a single web-based inte...
In this paper, we present the implementation of an advanced convex optimisation
method in the framework of integrated assessment modelling. The integrated
assessment of optimal policies requires a flexible and modular optimisation framework to
exchange information between models while providing a consistent response in a reasonable
time. In the Lux...
This letter presents a methodology for an integrated energy–air quality model in a cost and
impact trade-off framework, applicable at the regional scale. ETEM (the Energy
Technology Environmental Model) minimizes the energy cost at a given level of sectoral
emissions. An efficient, reduced-order Eulerian air quality model (TAPOM-Lite) simulates
som...
Grazing of grasslands changes soil physical and chemical properties as well as vegetation characteristics, such as vegetation cover, species composition and biomass production. In consequence, nutrient allocation and water storage in the top soil are affected. Land use and management changes alter these processes. Knowledge on the impacts of grazin...
Europe's public airports and its aviation industries face the transport challenge of working toward sustainable development, a concept that incorporates both the effective functioning and protection of the environment. This paper addresses how a decision tool is applied toward aviation community noise and could be used to assist in airport manageme...
This paper describes a multi-indicator assessment and minimization problem focused on aviation "Community" noise. The model explores a combined noise and emission objective for airfreight movements at Luxembourg's Findel Airport. Community noise is evaluated via four population impact indicators emissions are tabulated from in-flight segments in th...
Air pollution models have been developed over the last few decades, ranging from large detailed models, involving complex physical-chemical phenomena, to less detailed models. Air pollution models can also be grouped according to their scale. The air quality model, AYLTP, to be presented in this paper, aims at a spatial grid specificity that falls...
This paper describes a geo-spatially distributed reference based energy model that is coupled to a reduced-order (efficient) photochemical air quality model. Project LEAQ, the Luxembourg Energy Air Quality Model, is built upon the large-scale systems analytic method, a meta-modelling approach that includes a full geo-spatial database of energy sour...
Agricultural activities in the Netherlands cause high nitrogen and phosphorous fluxes from soil to ground- and surface water. A model chain (STONE) has been developed to study and predict the magnitude of the resulting ground- and surface water pollution under different environmental conditions. STONE has three main components, namely: 1) the ferti...
A study was carried out in Vanhoi commune, Tam Duong district, in the Red River Delta, North Vietnam, to determine N concentrations in shallow groundwater (NO 3 -N and NH 4 -N) under various environmental conditions (soil and topography) and land uses. Water samples were taken at one meter depth during the growing season using open porous pipes and...
Precision Farming addresses the small-scale variability of soil fertility parameters in the field and consequently transforms them into variable fertilizer applications. Geocoded information about spatially variable soil characteristics is required in a close enough distance of 30 to 50 meters to meet the spatial correlation which is a prerequisite...
The interdisciplinary nature of environmental research centres, dealing with geospatial data, analysis and environmental modelling on a daily basis, requires specific methods and technologies in the field of geospatial information management. The large amount of generated information has to be stored, catalogued, visualised and treated effectively...