Clouds - Meteo @ WUR

Speeding up radiative transfer solvers with machine learning

Machine learning provides great opportunities for accelerating the representation of physical processes in weather and climate models. Radiative transfer solvers, which deal with the transport of solar and thermal radiation, are often the most costly parametrization in models. Speeding them up is one of the main ambitions of SLOCS. In

Clouds

Details of the surface wind matter in tropical convection

Tropical clouds play an important role in the energy balance of the earth. Clouds reflect solar radiation into space, but also absorb heat that is emitted from the surface of the earth. Clouds therefore play an important role in setting the global atmospheric temperature. In turn, the atmospheric temperature determines

Publication

Surface warming leads to more clouds over temperate forest

In a new paper in Quarterly Journal of Royal Meteorological Society, we present a potential mechanism to explain the observed enhanced cloud formation over Western European forests, such as in Les Landes, France. This work was the MSc thesis project of Peter Bosman, the first author of the paper. We

Solar energy

Project on solar energy and electricity grid management granted

Our project Every ray counts has been granted in the Industrial Doctorates call from NWO. In this project, our group at Wageningen University and Research and electricity grid manager Alliander will collaborate with the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and the Applied Material Science group of Radboud University Nijmegen to provide

Clouds

Three new papers on land-atmosphere interactions

We have published three new papers on land-atmosphere interactions, and the soil moisture-precipitation feedback. The first paper Land-Atmosphere Interactions: The LoCo Perspective is published in BAMS, the American Meteorological Society's flagship journal. The paper presents an overview of the research that has been done under the umbrella of the GEWEX

Weather

Global moisture transport in ERA5

The new ECMWF ERA5 data shows the global moisture transport at an unprecedented detail level. For my atmospheric dynamics class, I have downloaded a year of data at the 850 hPa level (just above the boundary layer) and composed a movie. The movie shows many of the essential ingredients of

Publication

Clouds can enhance photosynthesis and evapotranspiration

Clouds reflect incoming solar radiation back into space, but also increase the amount of diffuse radiation that reaches the land surface. Our new study (lead author Xabier Pedruzo-Bagazgoitia) shows that thin clouds are beneficial for CO2 assimilation and evapotranspiration, due to the influence of diffuse radiation. This analysis is based

Publication

More clouds over Western European forests

Our new article in Nature Communications (lead author Ryan Teuling) presents observational proof of enhanced cloud formation over Western European forests. The related press release of Wageningen University can be found here (in Dutch). The sketch below, which is explained in detail in the article, shows the complexity of cloud