College of Sciences and Arts News

In this guest blog, Karen McNulty Walsh of Brookhaven National Laboratory explains how Michigan Technological University scientists and alumni developed an innovative, centimeter-scale view into lab-created clouds to uncover structural features important to rainfall, brightness, and representation in atmospheric models. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators have developed a new type of lidar — a laser-based remote-sensing instrument — that can observe cloud structures at the scale of a single centimeter. The scientists used this high-resolution lidar to directly observe fine cloud structures in the uppermost portion of laboratory-generated clouds. This capability for studying cloud tops with resolution that is 100 to 1,000 times higher than traditional atmospheric science lidars enables pairing with measurements in well-controlled chamber experiments in a way that has not been possible before.