My group focuses on using airborne observations to understand how small-scale cloud processes are important to climate. Current topics include the effects of pollution on the radiative properties of clouds, and the interactions between dynamics, radiation, and microphysics within tropical cirrus.

The smallest features of aerosols and clouds, on scales of micrometers or less, make critical differences to how our climate system works. Often very little about their nature is known and studies on these scales sometimes reveal surprises  important to models of the earth's radiation budget. My past and current studies have explored the effects of pollution on stratocumulus cloud properties, ice cloud optics in the Arctic and Tropics, and Saharan dust physics. Recent field work has placed instruments for measuring cloud optical and microphysical properties on aircraft that have flown in Florida cirrus anvils, Atlantic hurricanes, Mid-latitude cirrus and polluted clouds downwind of the U.S. eastern seaboard.