When does a cloud form?
by Pilar Gumà-Claramunt, Stefanos Samaras, Lukas Pfitzenmaier, Veronika Wolf, and Elisa Adirosi
The goal of the project was to separate clear sky and cloudy sky conditions during June 2014 above Juelich. The used instrument was the InfraRed Thermometer (IRT), which measures downwelling radiance at 11 µm. Data of the Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer (AERI) measuring at the same wavelength were also used.
Fig. 1: Time series of infrared brightness temperatures at 11 µm over the full month of June 2014. Symbols as explained above.
How much water does a cloud have?
Quantification of cloud water mass from synergetic ground-based remote sensing measurements
by Alexander Myagkov, Athina Argyrouli, Edouard Martins, Jordi Tiana-Alsina and Tom Goren1
1The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
1. Introduction
Clouds are one of the key climate regulators since they influence Earth’s energy balance by interacting with solar and terrestrial radiation (however the cloud feedback in the current global models has large uncertainty). Quantifying the amount of water in a cloud is a valuable information in order to determine the precipitation initiation and to assess better the contribution of liquid water droplets to Earth’s energy budget. Additionally, climate models need a validation of the in-cloud parameterizations. To estimate the water mass and energy inside a cloud, we have used both passive (microwave radiometer) and active (cloud radar, ceilometer, and wind lidar) ground-based remote sensing instruments located at Jülich research center facilities (Löhnert et al., 2014). The synergetic use of measurements collocated in time and space allows the reasonable assessment of the three dimensional distribution of cloud macro- and micro-physical properties.
ITaRS' Summer School winners at the TOPROF meeting
In the last ITaRS Summer School on “Clouds and Precipitation: Observation and Processes”, which was held in the Jülich Research Center (Germany), the group working on the topic “When does a cloud form?” was selected as the one that made the best work in such a short period of time. The name of the group was “The Transformers” and their members were Elisa Adirosi (CNR-ISAC, Rome, Italy), Pilar Gumà-Claramunt (CNR-IMAA, Potenza, Italy), Lukas Pfitzenmaier (TU Delft, The Netherlands), Stefanos Samaras (University of Potsdam, Germany) and Veronika Wolf (DWD, Lindenberg, Germany).
The Transformers were awarded with the possibility to attend the meeting of TOPROF, the acronym of a COST Action standing for “Towards operational ground based profiling with ceilometers, Doppler lidars and microwave radiometers for improving weather forecasts”, which was held in the DTU Risø Campus in Roskilde, Denmark.
Clouds monitored extensively during 8 week international monitoring campaign
TUDelft news published an article about the ACCEPT campaign in Cabouw with participation of ITaRS-fellows: Lukas Pfitzenmaier, Alexander Myagkov, Edouard Martins and Pilar Gumà-Claramunt
On Tuesday October 7th, the international monitoring campaign ACCEPT (Analysis of the Composition of mixed-phase Clouds with Extended Polarization Techniques) will kick-off at the CESAR monitoring site (Cabauw Experimental Site for Atmospheric Research) near Cabauw (The Netherlands). For a period of eight weeks, scientists from several meteorological knowledge institutes from Germany and the Netherlands, led by TU Delft and the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), will monitor clouds using a very diverse collection of measuring techniques. By combining the results, the researchers want to map in detail the processes taking place inside clouds.