ITaRS fellow at GEWEX conference
Here me again, another trip, another conference: GEWEX, TheHague, July 2014.
From this conference, I have a very simple take home message that in my opinion summarizes all the main topics touched during the various sessions. I'm talking about Bjorn Stevens's talk "Cloud, circulation and sensitivity".
AMS conference. My very first conference.
My first working trip, and in general, the first time in US, the first time in a huge and important conference. Mixing of fear, curiosity, desire to meet and exchange, and also to learn, and know more about the community I am working in.
Long trip, nice clouds from the little oval window of the plane, bringing me back every moment to the question of my study: how rain is forming, how these drops are colliding together to grow bigger and bigger. In which conditions does this happen? What fosters, and what makes this process more difficult?
The plane is flying fast, and in a few hours I land in Boston.
ITaRS fellow at CHARADMexp campaign
While looking for patriotic clouds in Greece, I spent one week in Crete, in the well-known Finokalia station, part of the ACTRIS network. 
The field campaign called CHARADMexp has been taking place there since June 20th with main scientific objective the characterization of aerosol mixtures of marine and dust origin. My interest has been focused on retrieving the vertical aerosol fluxes in the marine PBL by combining an aerosol Raman lidar with a wind lidar. To the best of my knowledge, this has not been done in the cloudy PBL yet and the clouds developed over Crete during this period offer unique cases for investigation.
Announcement for ACCEPT campaign - 6th October till 16th November 2014
Mixed-phase clouds are frequently observed in the atmospheric temperature range between -40 and 0 °C where water droplets and ice crystals can coexist. The composition of these mixed-phase clouds, i. e., the partitioning of liquid water and ice, plays a crucial role in the formation of precipitation and in the cloud radiative effect. The passage of crystals through layers of supercooled liquid water affects ice crystal growth and shape. Thus, to observe the evolution of the microphysical properties of ice crystals through mixed-phase layers, knowledge about their size, mass, and shape is required. The proposed project aims at improving techniques for phase detection and estimation of crystal shape at all stages, from the cloud formation to the precipitation of ice particles. Information about the shape of ice crystals is a prerequisite for the determination of size and mass of ice crystals, because the shape determines the relationship between measured particle fall velocity and the unknown particle size.
