Professor Steven Sherwood awarded ARC Laureate Fellowship

Professor Steven Sherwood, Director of CCRC, has been awarded a prestigious ARC Laureate Fellowship in the 2015 round, with $2.77 million for his research in the physics of clouds for the next five years.

Revisiting the physics of clouds: This fellowship project aims to bring new rigour to climate modelling by improving our understanding of key phenomena like clouds and storms. Earth’s climate has taken a number of turns in the recent and geologic past that so far cannot be reproduced in models. Clouds and atmospheric turbulence are also a problem for weather and climate prediction, the conceptual understanding of which now has evident flaws. The hypothesis of this project is that these two problems are strongly linked, and that this link may be exploited to solve problems across disciplines. This project aims to systematically re-evaluate our conceptual understanding of cloud physics, and investigate how this affects our understanding of climate phenomena in Earth’s past and future.