New tenure-track professor at IMKTRO
Aerosols contribute to the Earth’s changing energy budget with a negative effective radiative forcing (cooling effect), most of which is due to aerosol-cloud interactions. However, quantitative estimates are still subject to considerable uncertainty, not least due to limited process-level understanding. Mineral dust from dry soils constitutes more than two-thirds of the global aerosol mass, causes about one-fourth of the attenuation of solar radiation by all aerosols, and it is also amongst the most important substrates for cloud formation through heterogeneous ice nucleation. Understanding atmospheric aerosol processes, e.g. sources, sinks, and interactions with the global water and energy cycles, is therefore decisive to understand our future weather and climate, and it is a main goal of the new tenure-track professorship at IMKTRO.
In this context, the research of tenure-track professor Martina Klose and her team focuses primarily on mineral dust as a dominant global aerosol type emitted from natural systems through wind erosion. A key approach of Klose’s research is to synergistically combine theoretical concepts, numerical modeling and model development, and experimental (field and laboratory) research with the goal to advance process understanding and model estimates of atmospheric aerosol, their interactions (e.g. with clouds and radiation), and impacts. Martina Klose has been leading a Helmholtz Young Investigator Group at IMKTRO since November 2020 and has assumed her new role as tenure-track professor at KIT on 1st January 2025.
https://www.imk-tro.kit.edu/english/10519.php