One of the largest uncertainties in our understanding of climate and climate change is the role of clouds in the climate system.
Clouds thus have both direct and indirect effects on the Earth's energy balance and water budget.
These questions are central to cloud-climate issues and we are attacking them through a variety of observational, modeling, and theoretical efforts. Second, we are using numerical modeling, including a computationally intensive cloud ensemble model, to develop hypotheses for testing by future observational work. Third, we are working with a group of scientists involved in NOAA's Pan American Climate Studies program to lay the groundwork for a large field program to study the east Pacific monsoon circulation. The east Pacific monsoon is a natural atmospheric circulation which is driven by the large cross-equatorial sea surface temperature gradient in the eastern Pacific ocean which occurs in the northern summer. The atmospheric circulation in this region is a miniature model of the global circulation and therefore forms an excellent natural laboratory for the study of globally important processes having to do with atmospheric convection.