NWO has awarded SRON researcher Hailing Jia an Open Competition ENW-M1 grant to better map the interaction between clouds and aerosols. The grant enables Hailing to hire a PhD student.
Aerosols are small particles in the air such as soot, sea salt and smoke. They have profound impacts on clouds such that they reflect more solar radiation back to space, exerting an overall cooling effect on the Earth. In this project, Hailing and her new PhD student will establish a novel framework to optimize the methodology used for estimating aerosol-cloud interactions (ACI) from satellites. In combination with satellites PACE and EarthCARE, they will determine the optimized satellite-based ACI and then use it to constrain current climate models. The project is a crucial step towards confident predictions of climate change, which is especially important given the context of continuously decreasing aerosol emissions in our warming world.
