Dr. Claudia Acquistapace – From the Tropics to the Alps to observe precipitation

This semester, we are excited to announce that the seminar series will be hosted by our collaborative partner ECMWF at their buildings in Bonn and it will be streamed online (via zoom).CESOC continues the seminar series “My Research” this Summer term 2024 with

Dr. Claudia Acquistapace

from the Institute of Geophysics and Meteorology, University of Cologne, talking on their work

“From the Tropics to the Alps to observe precipitation”

when: on Tuesday, 02 July 2024 at 11:00 am (CEST)
It is open to any interested person within the CESOC research disciplines (any Earth system sciences, mathematics or computer science).
Please contact info[@]cesoc.net, if you would like to participate.
Full Schedule could be found here!

Abstract:
Precipitation, a vital component of life on Earth, remains one of the most challenging variables to observe and model. Rainfall observations occur at various temporal and spatial scales, each with its own uncertainties. Models often struggle to accurately capture the location and intensity of rainfall events, particularly those occurring over orography, due to the complex nature of these events.
A few years ago, I participated in the Eurec4a campaign in the tropics. The campaign mainly focused on understanding the links between shallow convection and mesoscale organization, leaving precipitation partially aside from its core focus. While measuring macroscopic cumulus cloud properties, we collected detailed and high-resolution observations of virga and precipitation. Exploiting the synergy of ship-based lidar and radar instruments, we could characterize how precipitation affects the environment and causes temperature and humidity anomalies (such as localized cooling or warming and changes in atmospheric moisture), providing valuable results for model evaluation in a statistical sense.
The trades, however, are not the only environment in which we work on precipitation. We have now shifted our focus to the Alps, where we are using satellite sensors in the EXPATS research group, recently funded within the IDEA-S4S framework. Here, we are harnessing the power of deep-learning methods, originally developed for image and video processing, to extract information from spatial and spatiotemporal patterns of clouds as seen by the different satellite channels or by satellite and ground-based radar data synergy. Although the project is still in its early stages, I am excited to present the approach and its potential for model evaluation and understanding extremes over complex orography.