Our Mission and Objectives

• To understand the role of precipitation processes, their interaction with the surface, their influence on regional and global hydrological cycles with regard to climate variations, and their contribution to the regional and global energy budget;
• To help development and refine space-borne retrievals;
• To use observations from both field campaigns and satellite missions to improve simulations and forecasts of severe weather events such as MCSs, fronts, monsoons, cyclones, and hurricanes;
• To improve the representation of moist processes as well as their interaction with radiation and their effect on transporting chemical species in global and climate models;
• To assess the effects of assimilating satellite-derived fields (i.e., rainfall) on the prediction and forecasting of tropical and midlatitude precipitation systems.
• To assess the impact of aerosol on cloud and precipitation processes and their interaction with radiation
• To develop a real time system for NASA field campaigns and a regional climate system to study the impact of cloud transport on aerosol
• Quantify the major microphysical processes (e.g., phase changes between water vapor and small, cloud-sized particles, mass flow rate of cloud condensate to precipitation) related to cloud and precipitation formation,
• Improve our understanding of the interactions between cloud dynamics, precipitation and radiation at different temporal and spatial scales,
• Provide multi-dimensional cloud data sets (i.e., a cloud data library) to the global modeling community to help improve the representation and performance of moist processes in climate models, and
• Facilitate the synthesis of field and satellite observations, cloud-resolving and global models.