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Top row: Neil M. Donahue, Dalia Kirschbaum, Juan Lora Bottom row: Tracey Holloway, Claudia Tebaldi, Ines Azevedo

Welcome to the Fall 2024 ESSIC Seminar Series!

Welcome to the Spring 2024 semester! We are pleased to announce the return of ESSIC’s Seminar Series. We have a wonderful lineup of senior and junior scientists who are prepared to deliver some compelling presentations about their work and research both in-person and remotely.

Some of our speaker highlights include Dalia Kirschbaum, Director of the Earth Science Division of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; Neil M. Donahue, Director of Carnegie Mellon’s Steinbrenner Institute as well as professor and AGU Fellow; Claudia Tebaldi, scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Joint Global Change Research Institute and AGU Fellow; Ines Azevedo, associate professor at Stanford; Tracey Holloway, professor at UW–Madison and member of National Academy of Medicine; and Juan Lora, assistant professor at Yale.

Please click “Read more” for our full lineup and to add these events to your calendar now!

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A schematic diagram describing the impacts of cloud-surface-coupling on the aerosol-cloud-interaction. When a cloud is coupled with the surface, a cloud is formed near the top of the planetary boundary-layer (PBL) that interacts strongly with the well-mixed aerosol, whereas they have little interaction under decoupled conditions. As aerosol alters cloud microphysics (more aerosol leads to more cloud droplets of smaller particle size that makes cloud brighter), solar radiation reflected by cloud is more under coupled conditions than under decoupled conditions, or a stronger cooling effect as indicated by the orange arrows. As a result, lack of accounting for the cloud-surface coupling tends to result in an underestimation of aerosol indirect radiative forcing, which is likely a major contributing factor to the systematic discrepancies between observation-based and model-based estimate of the aerosol cooling effect. Adapted from Su et al. (2024, Sci. Adv.).

Aerosols Affect Climate More Than We Think

A key to improve climate prediction is to improve understanding of the impact of aerosol on clouds, or commonly known as the aerosol-cloud-interaction according to a new study led by Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC) researchers published today in Science Advances.

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