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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		Bridging gap between simple lab experiments & the complexity of the atmosphere
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:03
	Publish Date:		2016-08-18 19:00:00
	Description:		Climate change models include many complex factors, from the Earth’s natural cycles to wind patterns. Even clouds must be considered when forecasting things like weather and temperature. At the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, physical chemist Kevin Wilson found a way to better predict the size of cloud droplets, which form on aerosolized particles like salt from sea spray. Wilson says the next step is to simplify their findings for these climate change models. "We’ve studied this cloud droplet formation in our laboratory under very controlled conditions, and so the kinds of models we’ve developed are much too complicated to actually implement in climate models. And so one next step is to be able to distill all of the molecular information to more simple parameterizations that accurately reflect the underlying physics and chemistry, but could be used in the climate model in a computationally efficient way. It’s trying to bridge the gap between simple laboratory experiments and the real complexity of the atmosphere."
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