A passion for predictions

Alain Geiger has been interested in weather ever since he was young. As he sat in his sailing boat, gliding across the water, the sun, wind, clouds and rain were never very far away. “I was fascinated by the wind and often wondered about the connection between the wind and the boat as it sailed along,” said the 60-year-old professor. “It was the formulae behind these kinds of relationship that interested me the most.”

He found the answers he was looking for when he was studying physics at ETH Zurich, particularly in the field of geophysics. His goal was to come up with hypotheses and make forecasts as to how the weather would unfold. He had always been interested in geography too, but the main focus of geographical research at the time was on describing things like countries, mountains and bodies of water.

“There is nothing you can predict,” he says. “It’s all already there.” Working in that particular field was therefore not an option for him, as he is keen to point out: “I don’t feel that I’ve really understood something until I can anticipate it.”

Even today, 35 years after completing his degree studies, his attitude remains virtually unchanged. He still takes enthusiastic pleasure in investigating interrelationships – which he now does in his capacity as an adjunct professor at the Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry (IGP), where he develops methods and applications for measuring geodetic and geophysical correlations: “We measure things like how Switzerland is being ‘compressed’, for example, and where it is ‘growing taller’.”

A pioneer in GPS technology

The IGP is where Professor Geiger began his academic career, initially as an assistant. The late 1970s saw the emergence of satellite measurements and navigation, paving the way for the modern global positioning system – or GPS – that is now a feature of every mobile phone. Taking satellite measurements involves using satellites in space as reference points which transmit signals back down to Earth. This makes it possible to work out the coordinates of a particular location.

Geiger and his team were amongst the first to use the devices designed for this and to develop software for taking such measurements. To do this, Geiger conducted countless field trials and carried out numerous experimental measurements – not just in Switzerland, but in places like Africa, Greece and Venezuela too.

From weather forecasts to sailing

Professor Geiger’s current work focuses primarily on Switzerland. With the help of a GPS measurement system, he and his colleagues locate phenomena such as water vapour in the atmosphere. As Geiger explains, if you know what quantities of water vapour have accumulated in which areas, you can tell where humidity levels are particularly high: “That information can be incorporated into weather forecasts.”

Weather forecasts are likely to prove useful to him on a personal level in around four years’ time, if not sooner. That is when he is due to retire, at which point he is eager to devote more time to cultivating his saxophone skills and, in particular, his love of sailing. He is not yet sure where his boat will take him, but there is one thing he is certain about: “It will be quite a long voyage.”