"Taste Natural Science" for school girls at University of Cologne
On 26 September 2014, the ITaRS fellows Xinxin Busch Li, Claudia Acquistapace, and Maria Barrera Verdejo joined the university’s annually event ‘Schnupperuni für Mädchen’. It is the goal of the science fair to guide the school girls of grade 7 and 8 towards learning physics through several physical experiments.
Cloud coverage? So clear, isn‘t it?
by Nicolae Ajtai, Ruben Barragan, Xinxin Busch-Li, Maria Jose Granados, Lev Labzovskii
Motivation:
Studying cloud cover is important since it plays an important role in the radiative balance of the atmosphere and its dynamics are significant in climate change studies. Cloud fraction (CF), a common quantity to measure cloud coverage, is defined as the portion of sky that is covered by clouds. In our study CF is measured by several ground-based remote sensors, Total sky imager (TSI), MIRA-36 Cloud Radar, and CT-25K Ceilometer. Comparing the CF observations from those three instruments is our major goal to evaluate the CF estimation difference.
Do models capture clouds?
by Umar Saeed, Sophia Schäfer, Ioannis Binietoglou, Paloma Borque, Lia Amaral
The topic of the “number crunchers” group was to understand the use of Large Eddy Simulation (LES) models to study cloud formation. LES are very high resolution models, suitable to study convective processes and cloud formation in scales not covered by typical weather models. For our group project we used the Dutch Atmospheric Large-Eddy Simulation (DALES) [1] to simulate the June 5, 2013 case in order to:
- study the effect of spatial resolution of the model to cloud representation.
- study the effect of driving meteorological fields on the model’s output.
- examine the effect of parameters such as the cloud condensation nuclei number and the incoming solar radiation in the simulated scenarios.
- understand different strategies for model - measurement comparison: direct comparison physical quantities and forward operator that simulates the raw instrument reading.
ER5 at BSC
During the first weeks of October, I visited the Earth Science Department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, to gain a deeper knowledge of dust transport modelling. The training’s focus was the design of an effective strategy for the comparison of measured vertical dust profiles and model outputs.
