On the interaction between clouds and wind

How is the interaction between clouds and the wind? Does the change in clouds also trigger changes in the wind? Does the change in wind change the clouds? What is the contribution of the different scale processes to the vertical transport of momentum? Those are the fundamental questions that guide my current research activities as a Post Doc at Delft University of Technology under the supervision of Dr Louise Nuijens.

To answer those questions, I am exploring state-of-the-art instruments for remote sensing the wind and the clouds. Those instruments are Doppler wind lidar and Doppler cloud radar. Together, they can provide profiles of wind speed and direction from near the surface to the cloud top, as I introduced in this paper: Combined wind lidar and cloud radar for high-resolution wind profiling. While working with those instruments, I also developed an open-source Python package for retrieving wind from Doppler lidar observations: lidarwind, available on GitHub.

The first experimental campaign of this project took place at Cabauw in the Netherlands from 13.09.2021 to 03.10.2021. Since then, the same experiment has occurred yearly to collect observations under different cloud cover and wind regimes. The picture at the top of this page gives an overview of the experimental site. In addition, the link below provides quick access to a visualisation platform I set up to help visualise data collected by the different instruments.

Link –> Visualisation platform.

Below, you can see the instruments used during the experiments: Dual and single-frequency radar and wind lidars.