Student Posters Repository

Understanding human impact on climate is the foremost challenge of the 21st century. In particular, significant work remains to correctly model the multi-scale nature of clouds. In particular, the evolution of cloud systems is a combination of the small-scale "microphysics" of liquid droplets and ice crystals and the large-scale atmospheric flows that supply moisture. Several examples of techniques to use cloud simulation and satellite data are presented. First the adjoint model of ice nucleation codes is used for global-scale attribution analysis, in which we identify the input variables that control temporal variability in cloud ice crystal number concentrations. We then zoom in, tracking a single control volume of atmospheric air to understand how thermodynamic conditions affect the evolution of these ice crystals numbers. Under the right dynamic conditions, these individual clouds may also organize to form mesoscale systems, and preliminary results of the effect of surface warming on this organization are shown. Future work will focus on using information entropy metrics to more rigorously quantify the degree of this clod aggregation.