I arrived at the 1st of May in Germany for the 2nd part of my secondment at the University of Cologne. I had visited Cologne for my preliminary secondment in 2013, when my PhD project had started. This time I got back there at the 3rd year of my project being more experienced.
There were several tasks that I accomplished during my 2nd stay. I finished all parts of my thesis related to the water vapor in the atmosphere and the microwave radiometer during this secondment. It was important to finish them in this particular period because Dr. Susanne Crewell (who is a member of my supervisory board team) could help me to revise these parts as she is an expert in microwave radiometry.
I participated to microwave radiometer calibration in Jülich together with Rainer Haseneder-Lind and Nils Küchler. Nils had written his master's thesis about microwave radiometer calibration, so he introduced me to new insights of this procedure and clarified a lot of tricky moments that I faced in Bucharest related to radiometer. This insight is crucially important for my future work, because I need to perform the calibration in Bucharest myself and will perform further analyses of the calibration's results.
Another important aspect of my stay in Cologne was the work with Maria Barrera Verdejo. During this period our collaboration was related to two things: the exchange of experience in our PhD projects (they are similar in some part) and to work together on a Wikipedia page devoted to a microwave radiometer.
Furthermore, I got a chance to visit two weekly seminars of the work group and I presented the recent results of my work to these other scientists in my field. There we discuss the problems and perspectives of my project. Additionally, I enjoyed to meet a lot of people from ITaRS, who currently work in the University of Cologne.
I would like to thank the whole staff of Dr. Crewell's group for the help and assistance that I received during these two weeks; there I could feel myself as a full member of the group.