Multiview stereophotogrammetry captures novel images of shallow clouds from all sides, generating unprecedented data sets For scientists, quantifying the behavior of clouds—which are swift, ephemeral, chemically complex, and eccentrically shaped—is notoriously difficult. As difficult as it is important. Clouds, after all, represent the biggest uncertainty in climate models. In particular, shallow cumulus clouds critically influence…

Veteran scientists weigh in on the best ways to break through to the measurements you need For more than 25 years, important atmospheric data have been collected, processed, and evaluated by multiple national laboratories and then stored by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).…

Scientists will gather detailed data on aerosol-cloud interactions within deep convective systems Deep convective clouds—the kind that often pack lightning and pour rain—occur nearly everywhere in the world. They are an important feature of the atmosphere, especially in storm systems that dominate the tropics and midlatitudes. To poets, these harbingers of storms are a durable…

With a chemist’s interest in mass spectrometry, Allison C. Aiken analyzes the particles that make clouds and influence weather and climate This is the first article in a new series of profiles on members of the ARM User Executive Committee (UEC). Editor’s note: Aiken was named the vice-chair of the UEC. She will serve in the…

Researchers combine fine-scaled observations with high-resolution LASSO runs to more accurately model the distribution of shallow cumulus clouds Cleveland State University atmospheric scientist Thijs Heus (pronounced “Tice Hoos”) is willing to begin at the beginning. “Everybody knows what a cloud is,” he says, gesturing upward in a video explaining the work he and his lab…