Atmospheric Science

Have you ever seen a weather forecast map that looked like it was wearing a striped sweater?

Jiong Chen December 23, 2025

Stripe patterns in the wind prediction.

This isn’t a new fashion trend in meteorology. For model developers, these unexpected stripes are a sign that something has gone wrong in the complex digital engine that powers our forecasts. Recently, our team at CMA Earth System Modeling and Prediction Centre (CEMC) encountered these very stripes in wind forecasts produced by an operational global model. We played the role of scientific de ...[Read More]

Harnessing Machine Learning to Advance Tropospheric Ozone Science

Paul Griffiths and Makoto Kelp December 5, 2025

Machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer powerful tools to address long-standing scientific challenges. At the molecular scale, we’ve seen projects like AlphaFold discover unknown protein structures and how they might interact with other molecules. At the planetary scale, ML-driven models like GraphCast (Google), AIFS (ECMWF) and ACE (Allen Institute for AI) are revolutionizin ...[Read More]

“You Can’t Get Around Clouds”: A Conversation with Climate Scientist Ulrike Lohmann

Roxana S. Cremer November 13, 2025

Prof. Dr. Ulrike Lohmann is a leading atmospheric physicist and climate scientist at ETH Zurich’s Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, renowned for her pioneering work on clouds, aerosols, and their interactions within the Earth’s climate system. Her research has significantly advanced our understanding of how microscopic particles influence cloud formation and, in turn, the global ...[Read More]

Nitrogen dioxide disparities in the time of COVID-19: How satellite data can facilitate environmental justice studies during this natural experiment and beyond

Gaige Kerr November 9, 2022

Around the world, the most vulnerable, marginalized, and racialized are disproportionately impacted by a variety of environmental stressors such as extreme heat, health-harming air pollution, and the growing impacts of climate change. In the United States, research has uncovered how Black and Brown communities and those with lower socioeconomic status are exposed to higher concentrations of many a ...[Read More]

Parenting in Academia: Challenges and Perspectives

EGU Working Groups January 15, 2022

Trying to juggle teaching, advising, publishing, finding a new (or permanent) job, relocating, attending conferences, and actually doing research sometimes requires more hours in the day than exist (oh and that global pandemic situation is sticking around). Additionally, many scientists have children or are starting a family at the same time as maintaining and building a career. In this week’s blo ...[Read More]

February 2021: A dusty month for Europe

Ali Hoshyaripour April 3, 2021

In February 2021, two major Saharan dust events hit Europe. Because of the prevailing weather conditions in the first and last week of February, several million tons of Saharan dust blanketed the skies from the Mediterranean Sea all the way to Scandinavia. The sandy sky was observed almost everywhere in Europe (Fig. 1). Moreover, the stained cars and windows indicated the dust deposition (Fig. 2 – ...[Read More]

EGU’s Climate: Past, Present & Future and Atmospheric Sciences Divisions welcome the US back into the Paris Climate Agreement

Fei Luo, Janina Nett, Chloe Hill and Athanasios Nenes March 3, 2021

As of 19 February 2021, the US officially re-joined the Paris Climate Agreement, a landmark international accord to limit global warming by 2°C (and ideally to 1.5°C) compared to pre-industrial levels. The Paris Climate Agreement aims to bring the world together to avoid catastrophic warming that will impact us all and to build resilience to the consequences of climate change that we are already s ...[Read More]

Using cloud microphysics to predict thunderstorms: How modelling of atmospheric electricity could save lives

Inna Gubenko February 14, 2021

A lightning strike: Will cloud microphysics help us predicting these? Image credit: Mike Lehmann, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The last three decades were the warmest in the history of meteorological observations in Europe. Temperature rise is accompanied by an increase in the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather and climatic events, which are the main risks for population and environment associated with modern climate change. An important class of such phenomena includes severe rainfall, tornadoes, squalls, and thu ...[Read More]

The acidity of atmospheric particles and clouds

Havala Pye January 27, 2021

Acidity Workshop at the US Environmental Protection Agency in North Carolina, USA during May 2019 leading to the publication by Pye et al. (2020). Pictured (left to right): Jeff Collett, Maria Kanakidou, John Walker, Havala Pye, Nicole Riemer, Andrew Ault, Athanasios Nenes, Simon Clegg, Rahul Zaveri, Andreas Tilgner, Mary Barth, Jim Kelly, Faye McNeill, and Andreas Zuend. Coauthors not pictured: Becky Alexander, Kathleen Fahey, Christopher Hennigan, Harmut Herrmann, I-Ting Ku, Thomas Schaefer, Guoliang Shi, Tao Wang, Rodney Weber, Jia Xing. Photo courtesy EPA and A. Nenes.

Many of us learned about acidity, or pH, in high school chemistry. We learned that acids like HCl could dissociate into H+ and Cl- and the activity of those H+ ions defined the acidity. In the atmosphere, the same basic definition of acidity, or pH on the molality scale, applies to aqueous phases like suspended particles and cloud droplets. Atmospheric acidity regulates what kinetic reactions are ...[Read More]

Community Effort to explore the Papers that shaped Tropospheric Chemistry

Paul Monks January 19, 2021

The sunset at Lake Petworth (J.W. Turner, 1827-8) (Licenced under creative commons, Tate Gallery, London, UK)

The genesis of the idea to explore the influence of certain papers on shaping the field of tropospheric chemistry came when editing a textbook chapter I had written a decade earlier. As I edited it I thought, what really is new; text-book worthy over the last 10 years? In some senses what is text-book worthy at all? These type of questions inspired me to think about where atmospheric chemistry has ...[Read More]