Parting Clouds
A Lab team goes places few reasonably can, to gather data few are capable of, all to improve how earth system models represent clouds.
- Kyle Dickman, Science Writer
Earth system models (ESMs) universally do a poor job of resolving clouds. Why? Because marine clouds form via different processes, produce different kinds and volumes of precipitation, and absorb different amounts of heat than a 45,000-foot-tall thunderhead over a mountain. Each cloud species must be modeled separately, and building each distinct model requires deep observational datasets from nearly all scales for nearly all environments. That’s where the Lab-hosted Field Instrument Deployment and Operations Team (FIDO), a branch of the DOE’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement user facility, comes in. The 20 technicians on FIDO’s team provide scientists at institutions around the world with the tools they need to document how regional clouds evolve from aerosols to maturity—soot to hurricanes. FIDO works in conjunction with satellite- and aircraft-based observational platforms, but their specialty lies in ground-based meteorology and aerosol measurements. For 24 hours a day, the 40–60 collocated instruments on FIDO’s three mobile laboratories are trained skyward. “Clouds and aerosols have a huge influence on the Earth’s energy balance,” says Heath Powers, a technical project manager at the Lab who leads FIDO. “But they’re tricky because they evolve over rapid time scales and behave differently depending on where they are and the conditions they form under.” Modeling clouds accurately at climatic scales requires understanding them at fine scales first. Here’s a by-the-numbers look at the ways FIDO’s recent deployments are changing how science sees clouds.
