This is a past event.

Laura Fierce of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will be presenting at the next Physics Colloquium. Please join the in-person presentation at 4:00 PM EST Thursday (October 13) in Fisher Hall 139.

MULTI-SCALE MODELING OF AEROSOL INTERACTIONS WITH CLOUDS AND RADIATION

Abstract: Aerosol effects on climate remain one of the largest sources of uncertainty in quantifying anthropogenic climate change, despite increases in model complexity. Aerosol interactions with clouds and radiation depend on the size, shape, and chemical composition of individual particles, as well as small-scale heterogeneity in environmental properties. However, this small-scale heterogeneity is not easily represented in large-scale atmospheric models. In this talk, I will describe process-level studies that reveal large errors in the cloud condensation nuclei activity and aerosol optical properties stemming from unresolved heterogeneity in particle and environmental properties. I will then describe how recent advances in aerosol microphysics simulations can be combined with machine learning to provide accurate and efficient aerosol representations in large-scale models. 

Bio: Laura Fierce is an Earth Scientist in the Atmospheric Sciences and Global Change Division at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Her research focuses on advancing the predictive understanding of aerosol effects on clouds and radiation through improved representation of multiscale aerosol processes. Dr. Fierce began her career in the DOE national laboratory system as a postdoctoral fellow, funded by a NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship, and then a scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Now at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, she specializes in particle-based methods for simulating aerosol size-composition distributions through the development of quadrature-based moment methods and the application of Monte Carlo methods.

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