Htet Yamin Ko Ko, or Coco for short, was born in Myanmar, and ever since she was a child she has dreamed about exploring the world. Issues like the shortage of water, glaciers melting and global warming caught her attention early on and were common reading topics. “I’m a bookworm, and I used to read a lot of science articles and magazines that would report about those issues. I grew up reading about climate change”, she says.
Her graduate studies bridged information technologies and computer vision research, and led her to do a PhD in Engineering from the Asian Institute of Technology, in Thailand, where she studied remote sensing and geographic information systems. Nowadays, she is on a mission to research how cities heat up and what are the best tools we can use to study this phenomenon. And there is no place like Bern to answer this question.
Thanks to its extensive air temperature monitoring network, with more than 60 stations across the city, Bern offers a unique window into how small cities deal with the urban heat island effect, which occurs when cities get much warmer than their surrounding rural areas. During her fellowship, Coco will work in collaboration with Stefan Brönniman and Moritz Gubler from the Geographic Institute of the University of Bern-GIUB, who have access to the data of the temperature monitoring network.
“The usual satellite measurements can be too rough for small areas, so I will be comparing satellite data with the data we can obtain from these local ground sensors. This will help us understand how we can achieve better and cheaper long-term monitoring instead of relying only on satellites. Hopefully, this project can also help create a ‘digital twin’ of Bern for better urban planning and heat prevention, like other smart cities already have”, Coco explains.
Coco hopes her work will help improve life in cities worldwide under a warming climate, and contribute for a better understanding of climate change by all spheres of society.
Welcome to ISSI, Coco!
