I’ve Looked at Clouds from Both Sides Now

There is likely little disagreement that the inner workings of Earth’s climate system are among the most profound of the many multi-physics multi-scale grand challenge scientific problems of importance to paths forward in a changing environment. Progress toward understanding the complexities of this system of systems has largely been driven by brute-force numerical explorations of highly non-linear phenomenological behavior, albeit incomplete because of uncertainties associated with the need for various approximations. This presentation will take a walk through alternative approaches to understanding complex atmospheric behavior by distilling fundamental theoretical foundations to mathematical frameworks that lend themselves to closed-form scientific exploration. We will discuss a decades-long, theoretical and phenomenological exploration of cloud processes by W. H. Schubert and collaborators, from boundary-layer clouds to deep convective cloud processes, as they operate across the wide range of time and space scales that contribute to the maintenance of the atmospheric general circulation.