Dr Paquita Zuidema

No simple fundamental theory yet exists for the governance of shallow cloud behavior, providing a major uncertainty for the prediction of future climate. Shallow cloud behavior includes their precipitation susceptibility, mesoscale organization, and, ulimately, an accurate connection to the cloud radiative effect. My research group seeks to increase our understanding of this important regime through articulating the relevant processes and their radiative impacts in the current climate, with a focus on shallow subtropical and tropical marine clouds. This means understanding the marine cloud response to the larger-scale synoptic, humidity and aerosol environment, at primarily sub-seasonal time scales. Our work is grounded in observations, either from field campaigns or satellites, and extended with modeling studies at scales that resolve cloud processes. Examples include the southeast Pacific stratocumulus, trade-wind cumulus, the humidity environment of equatorial deep convection, and, more recently, the smoke-above-cloud regime of the southeast Atlantic, and the Saharan dust that advects over Miami every summer.