Atmospheric Physics (Prof. Ulrike Lohmann)

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Image map of research topics: Please click on a topic to learn more about our research!
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Atmosphärenphysik Forschungsgruppe: Wie entstehen Wolken und Niederschlag?
Group
Left to right: Front row: Michael Rösch, Christopher Fuchs, Anna Miller, Liviana Klein, Emilie Fons, Baptiste Testa Middle row: Srdjan Sabic, Jie Chen, Judith Kleinheins, Mayur Sapkal, Ulrike Lohmann, Huiying Zhang, Mingjie Zheng, Cuiqi Zhang Top: Fabiola Ramelli, Nikolaos Papaevangelou, Zamin Kanji, Nadja Omanovic, Ulrich Krieger, Sylvaine Ferrachat, Claudia Marcolli, Jan Henneberger, Yu Wang, Luo Beiping, Ulrike Proske In absence: Tom Peter, David Neubauer, Diego Villanueva, Kai Jeggle, Robert Spirig, Peter Isler

Group overview

Professor Lohmann's group focuses on the formation and evolution of clouds with a special interest on ice crystals and aerosol-cloud interactions. This is done by improving the simulations of clouds for weather and climate, lab experiments on ice crystal formation and field experiments, the latest of which evolve around using clouds as a natural laboratory as funded by the ERC CLOUDLAB project.

A series of interviews and documentaries exists that explain the goals of our research. They can be found on our media page.

Enlarged view: An introduction to clouds - From the microscale to climate

An Introduction to Clouds provides a fundamental understanding of clouds, ranging from cloud microphysics to the large-scale impacts of clouds on climate. For more information visit the external pagepublisher's webpage. An up-to-date list of known errata can be found Downloadhere (PDF, 140 KB).

Research

Cloud feedbacks in response to greenhouse gas warming remain one of the largest uncertainties for climate change predictions (external pageIPCC, 2021). Clouds reflect solar radiation causing a cooling and absorb and re-​emit terrestrial radiation causing a warming. While the cooling effect of clouds dominates for low-​level clouds (stratus, stratocumulus), the warming effect dominates for high-​level ice clouds (cirrus).

Aerosol particles also scatter and absorb solar radiation and determine cloud microphysical properties by acting as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) and ice nucleating particles (INPs). The radiative forcing of aerosol particles resulting from human activities has the largest uncertainties of all anthropogenic forcing agents (external pageIPCC, 2021). Especially the details of ice formation and subsequent processes involving ice crystals in clouds are not fully understood. We focus our research on understanding ice formation and growth in clouds through laboratory measurements, field observations, and modelling on various scales. Please use the map of research topics below to the related topics to learn more!

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