NCARŐs Advanced Study Program sponsors 
clouds and climate colloquium
by Joan Frisch, NCAR Media Relations

nderstanding and modeling the role of clouds in the climate system is now 
recognized as one of the key problems in the geophysical sciences.  Recent 
observations from space indicate that clouds cool the planet.  The important 
question is, will the cooling effect of clouds change in response to human-
induced climate change?  

To address this question, a greater understanding of what determines the life 
cycle of clouds is required.  Since these processes span many orders of 
magnitude in both space and time, a diverse group of scientists must address 
this problem.  And, more important, a new generation of scientists must be 
trained to tackle the diverse range of issues surrounding the clouds and 
climate problem.

One effort to fill this need was an NCAR Advanced Study Program (ASP) 
summer colloquium on clouds and climate, held last July in Boulder, 
Colorado.  The colloquium was organized to address three fundamental scales 
for cloud processes:  the microscale, including aerosol and chemistry issues; 
the meso-scale, including the transport of chemical species; and the global 
scale, including the use of global general circulation models for cloud-climate 
studies.  

Each week of the three-week colloquium focused on one of the three cloud 
scales and its related physical processes.  In addition, the colloquium provided 
an opportunity for lecturers to present data from relevant field studies of 
clouds.  Students saw results from the Atlantic Stratocumulus Experiment 
(July 1992); the Tropical Ocean and Global Atmosphere Program Coupled 
Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment (December to February 1993); and 
the Central Equatorial Pacific Experiment (March and April 1993).

Thirty-six students participated in the ASP colloquium, which was organized 
by Jeffrey Kiehl of NCARŐs Climate and Global Dynamics Division.  The 
attendees represented over 20 universities and research institutions in the 
Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), Morocco, Spain, England, and the United 
States.  

Among the 30 lecturers who participated were Paul Crutzen, Max Planck 
Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, FRG; Anthony Del Genio, National 
Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute for Space Studies; 
Leo Donner, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Geophysical 
Fluid Dynamics Laboratory; and Richard Johnson and David Randall, 
Colorado State University.  Other speakers were V. Ramanathan and Richard 
Somerville, Scripps Institution of Oceanography; V. Ramaswamy, Princeton 
University; Susan Solomon, NOAA Aeronomy Laboratory; and Peter 
Webster, Judith Curry, and Margaret Tolbert, University of Colorado at 
Boulder.  For more information, see      page 15.