The Physics of Clouds and Atmospheres
Our work focuses on understanding the physics of clouds, how they respond to their environment and their impact on the climate. We use a variety of different satellite datasets and a range of atmospheric models (from cloud to climate scales) as well as developing new observation systems and machine-learning techniques.

Recent highlights from our research group include:

Pollution in a warmer Arctic - While aerosols normally modify clouds to cool the climate in the Arctic, work by Rebecca Murray-Watson showed that this effect is significantly weakened as the climate warms. Not only does this highlight dangers from shipping pollution in a warmer Arctic, it demonstrates how pollution can change the response of clouds to warming.

Contrails, climate and COVID-19 - The shutdown in air traffic in response to the COVID pandemic provided a unique opportunity to assess the climate impact of aviation. Together with researchers in France and Germany, this work provided a new observational measure of the role of this hard-to-decarbonise sector.

Monitoring ships from space - By matching ship position information to satellite data, we measured the sensitivity of individual clouds to ship pollution. Not only does this provide a valuable insight into the behaviour of clouds and the magnitude of highly uncertain atmospheric processes, it also demonstrates a method to monitor ships and shipping pollution from space.