CEEES - Simulation of atmospheric clouds

Clouds are a ubiquitous feature of the atmosphere, and play an enormous role in the climate and water cycles. In certain ways, they are straightforward: when enough water condenses into the liquid phase, they rain. But they are deceptively complex as well: each droplet forms onto an atmospheric aerosol which can be made of a huge variety of materials and come in many different sizes, while the total number of droplets determines how bright the cloud will be, how fast it will start to rain, and how long the cloud will last. Understanding these relationships is quite difficult and is the subject of a lot of ongoing research.

One option for studying these processes is to try and observe them, while another is to examine them in numerical simulations. This project will use simulations to try to understand key steps in the cloud-aerosol interaction process. The researcher will compile and run a large-scale simulation code on a large computing cluster, and write their own analysis scripts to process and plot the data.