Friday, September 15, 2017

Johannes Kapser defends his PhD Thesis "Modeling of thermal lifts"

Johannes Kapser, PhD candidate at Z_GIS successfully defended his PhD Thesis “Modelling of Thermal Lift: Techniques for Mining Thermal Eddies from Aerial Movement Data”.

Being a passionate glider pilot Johannes’ research was all centred around the core question “how to model thermal lift based on collectively sensed aerial trajectory data”. Therefore he approached this central research question through three main research themes: thermal lifts, trajectory parameters and patterns, and data-based deterministic and probabilistic modelling.

As one of his major results, Johannes came to the conclusion that there is great potential in the explict geospatial modeling of thermal eddies for better understanding of thermal processes in different environments. The successful modeling of the relation between environmental context and thermals can also accelerate research in the direction of thermal prediction for secure identification of thermal lifts.

A very international audience followed Johannes’ impressive and challenging presentation and actively participated in the lively discussion between after the evaluators, Dr. Josef Strobl and Dr. Robert Marschallinger, both from Z_GIS at the University of Salzburg were satisfied with all their questions. Dr. Thomas Blaschke as the main supervisor acted as the chair. 

Johannes works for a private company in the Munich aerospace industry. We wish him well on his road to a successful career in industrial research!

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