This year's Charney Lecture at the AGU Fall Meeting was given by Professor Ulrike Lohmann from ETH Zurich. Her topic was:
A21N-01 Grand Challenges in Understanding Clouds: From Ice Crystal Formation to Their Influence on Climate (Invited)
Ulrike Lohmann, ETH Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
As she said, you can just enjoy clouds by looking at them, "looking at the beauty that is out there". Although you can tell she loves clouds from an aesthetic viewpoint, she is also curious about them from a scientific perspective. Her talk outline was:
- Importance of clouds for radiative forcing - which means there is an external perturbation to the system;
- Ice crystal formation in the laboratory and in the field - ice crystals are understood much less than liquid clouds
- Importance of clouds for climate change
- Climate engineering with cirrus clouds
