Assist. Prof. Dr. Nina Črnivec (FMF): Researching clouds and radiation to advance weather and climate models

Clouds are vital occurrences in the global atmosphere involving diverse phenomena such as fair-weather shallow cumulus as well as destructive, deep convective cloud systems such as tropical cyclones. Inhomogeneous cloud fields furthermore interact with a variety of physical processes in the atmosphere such as solar and terrestrial radiation, which is difficult to accurately represent in coarse-resolution weather and climate models. Specific cloud regimes---namely low bright clouds over dark tropical oceans---reflect a significant portion of the incoming sunlight back to space and thereby notably cool the Earth, yet this phenomenon has been poorly captured in several generations of climate models, which inhibits reliable climate change projections. In my talk I will present highlights of my research in the field of clouds, radiation, weather and climate modeling that I have carried out in recent years at various institutions abroad---mainly at the Meteorological Institute at LMU Munich as well as the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia University and NASA GISS. I will finally briefly outline my ongoing work activities within the World Climate Research Programme, where we strive to overcome challenges related to analyzing, evaluating and interpreting results of climate multi-model ensembles.
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