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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		Looking at the microphysics of cloud formation
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:01
	Publish Date:		2016-09-21 19:00:00
	Description:		The meteorology of cloud formation is relatively well understood. Physical chemist Kevin Wilson of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory explains that’s because it's pretty easy to predict when and where clouds will form in the atmosphere. "Conditions have the right temperature, the right amount of water vapor, but what's more uncertain, has been a challenge for models, for example, is to understand what I would call the microphysics, which is how do individual cloud droplets form." Wilson and his colleagues simulated the microphysics in the lab, using custom-built equipment to model cloud droplet formation. This gave them a much better understanding of what's going on at the microscopic level, which may improve the accuracy of climate change models. "We hope that we can develop more accurate predictions that ultimately can go into models, climate models, that hopefully long term, will give us more accurate predictions of the kinds of climate change processing we might expect in the future."
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