Increasing environmental problems worldwide and the associated increasing awareness of global environmental change in our societies clearly show the need to build a new community of collaboration between the public, environmental scientists and administration. This should lead to a new and better way to conduct environmental science and environment-related decision making. An important part of this is prediction and warning of natural hazards. The lead idea here is that flexible methods of risk management need to be deployed to deal with potentially changing and more extreme events. The Swiss Experiment (SwissEx) will be an important trigger for creating the new community of collaboration and a building block to construct prediction systems of small scale Alpine natural hazards.
In the Swiss Experiment, multidisciplinary environmental observations based on new sensor and data technology will make it possible to achieve an affordable yet unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution of complex environmental systems. It is structured along three major axes: data acquisition – the process of measuring and recording environmental parameters; data management – the means to safely store that data and channel it to its users; and data exploitation – the application of models to that data in order to transform it into scientific and practical results. As a first step, improved local observations will be used to predict local flooding events.