Clouds and Precipitation in the sun
by Sarah Henkel
Except for a few raindrops, urgently needed for an experiment, beautiful September weather welcomed the guests of the ITaRS Summer School “Clouds and Precipitation: Observation and Processes”. From September 08-17, 2014, 30 young researchers met for two intensive weeks in the Research Center Jülich, Germany. They came from institutions in Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, Canada, Brazil, USA, Barbados, UK, Israel and Greece. Half of the participants were ITaRS fellows.
ESR12 at University of Hertfordshire (UK) for a second time
From January 18th to February 13th, I was hosted at the University of Hertfordshire (UH) for a secondment aiming to apply the inversion algorithm to the HygrA-CD campaign lidar data. The microphysical properties of aerosols are critical for examining aerosols' ability to act as Cloud Condensation Nuclei (CCN). For the purposes of my Ph.D. thesis, we need to retrieve aerosol microphysics at lofted layers within the Planetary Boundary Layer (i.e., at the so-called residual layer).
The goal of this visit was to retrieve aerosols' microphysical properties (e.g., effective radius, number concentration) from optical data (i.e., 3 backscatter coefficients & 2 extinction coefficients). Vertical profiles of aerosols' optical properties were retrieved with the use of Single Calculus Chain (SCC), a dynamic processing tool developed for all lidar stations within the European Aerosol Research Lidar Network (EARLINET). The lidar inversion algorithm was applied to homogeneous aerosol layers and subsets from the solution space with low discrepancy (<1%) have been evaluated from the physical point-of-view.
An ITaRS Sister: ARM Summer Workshop in Oklahoma
In an effort to promote the training of the next generation of atmospheric scientists, the first ever ARM Summer Workshop on observations and modeling of aerosol, clouds, and precipitation will take place this summer July 13-24, 2015. Sponsored by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility, this workshop will cater to graduate and postdoctoral students interested in observations and modeling of aerosol, clouds, and precipitation processes. This workshop is modeled after a similar effort conducted by the ITaRS program in 2014.
The summer workshop will provide theoretical and practical training on instruments from the Southern Great Plains site and will encourage innovative methods for using ARM facilities to address complex scientific inquiries. The summer workshop will be held at the National Weather Center in Norman, Oklahoma.
ITaRS ESR attends training course on numerical weather prediction at NCAR
by Robert Banks
During the last week of January 2015 ITaRS fellow Robert Banks participated in the 2015 Winter Tutorial for the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) mesoscale meteorological model. The one-week training course was held at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, USA.
