Summer School 2013 in Braunfels

INUIT Summer School on "Atmospheric Ice Nucleation and its Implications"
Braunfels an der Lahn, September 15 to 20, 2013
Organizers: Corinna Hoose and the INUIT group

Ice formation via homogeneous and heterogeneous nucleation is a topic of active laboratory, field and modeling research. Heterogeneous ice nucleation occurs on a small subset on the atmospheric aerosol population, but can have significant impact on cloud optical properties, lifetime, and precipitation formation. In the recent years, advanced laboratory and field instruments have been developed to understand ice nucleation measure it quantitatively, and the results are being used to develop parameterizations for models on different scales. This has led to a rapidly growing body of literature and to the involvement of new groups in ice nucleation research. With the INUIT Summer School, organized by the DFG “Ice Nucleation Research UnIT”, we have aimed to offer PhD students and postdocs who have recently started in this field a thorough and in-depth introduction to the topic. 

The INUIT Summer School took place in Braunfels an der Lahn in the idyllic “Schloss-Hotel” from September 15 to 20, 2013. Lectures were given by the INUIT principal investigators and scientists Joachim Curtius, Thomas Koop, Frank Stratmann, Ottmar Möhler, Alexei Kiselev, Johannes Schneider, Martin Ebert, Bernhard Pummer, Thomas Leisner and Corinna Hoose. In addition, a number of international experts were invited, funded by the Gesellschaft für Aerosolforschung GAeF: Ben Murray (University of Leeds, UK), Paul DeMott (Colorado State University, US), Jacob Fugal (May-Planck-Institute for Chemistry, Mainz), Paul Connolly (University of Manchester, UK) and Ulrike Lohmann (ETH Zurich, Switzerland). Exercises on parcel modeling and experiments with a simple cold stage device were organized and supervised by Paul Connolly and Nadine Hoffmann. 37 participants from 14 different institutions in 5 countries on 3 continents attended the school, filling the lecture room to its maximum capacity. The interest by the ice nucleation community in the school was very high, such that unfortunately not all applicants could be accepted.

In the feedback which we collected at the end of the school, the participants emphasized the high quality and topicality of the lectures. The exercises were positively received as a possibility to put knowledge into practice. In a poster session, the participants had the possibility to present their own research, which led to lively discussions extending into the evening. Several participants mentioned that they highly appreciated that most lecturers stayed in Braunfels for several days, allowing informal interactions in the coffee breaks, over dinner or during the hike which took the group to a crystal cave in the nearby Geopark Westerwald-Lahn-Taunus.

Photos von Anja Danielczok und Matthias Hummel