ITaRS fellow awarded for best oral presentation at DUST 2014
The 1st International Conference on Atmospheric Dust (www.dust2014.org) took place in Castellaneta Marina (Italy) from 2nd to 6th June 2014. This conference was a unique opportunity to bring together experts from different fields (such as geochemistry, physics, volcanology and mineralogy) to discuss and exchange knowledge on the boundless world of the atmospheric particles. The ITaRS fellows Ioannis Binietoglou, Lev Labzovsky and Pilar Gumà-Claramunt contributed to the conference with the oral presentations "Near real-time lidar aerosol products for dust model evaluation and assimilation", "Characteristics of a major Saharan dust event during May 2013 at Magurele, Romania" and "Aerosol observations with a cloud radar" respectively. The last of these talks won a Student Award for one of the three best oral presentations at the conference.
ITaRS fellows in Potenza
On the way to the DUST conference 2014, Ioannis Binietoglou and I visited the Institute of Methodologies for Environmental Analysis in Potenza. During the visit I was acquainted with remote sensing equipment that is available in the institute. ITaRS fellow Pilar Gumà-Claramunt demonstrated the cloud radar, one of the main instruments she's working with. Aldo Amodeo presented the variety of lidars installed at the measurement site and introduced me to the principles of operation of their main multiwavelength lidar.
During this short visit I got useful experience by getting to know the variety of specific lidar systems I was not working with before. Also it was a very nice experience to meet all the people that I know from the institute and meet new ones. I appreciate the warm hospitality I found there.
ITaRS fellow at the German Aerospace Center
Recently I paid a visit in DLR, a.k.a. German Aerospace Center in Neustrelitz, a town located in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. I spent a week there to meet Tom Rother, a Senior Scientist and discuss with him and his collegues several topics directly related to my research regarding the microphysics of non-spherical particles.
Tom (and his team), being one of the very few experts who have developed a non-spherical particle scattering software and database, shared with me the ideas and the developing concept behind this 15-year-long project to meet at this time a variety of applications, which was at very least higly motivational. As my work involves complex calculations of scattering efficiencies, this software will ideally prove a valuable time saver. The wide range of applicability of such a sophisticated software needs one to be focused on what one wants to do in order to be useful for one’s work and this is the first issue one has to resolve. During this week not only did I learn more about the latter but also many details about what lies behind the algorithms for different application scenarios.