Summer School 2026

Aerosols in Climate Change

Stephanie Fiedler

Aerosols are small particles in Earth’s atmosphere that are usually invisible to human eyes, yet

they play a crucial role for weather and climate. Through scattering and absorbtion of sunlight,

and their influence on cloud processes, aerosols act to regionally cool the climate. This is very

much in contrast to greenhouse gases that cause global warming, but the magnitude of aerosol

effects on climate is amongst the largest uncertainties in our understanding of climate change

and limits regional climate predictability. In the lectures, we will gain an overview of sources and

fate of aerosols, including their role in weather and climate processes. We will shed light on

known unknowns in our understanding of aerosols and their effects. The content will illustrate

how modern climate research strives to make progress with measurements on different

observational platforms and with new experiments of complex models on high-performance

computers spanning processes from the microphysical scale to the planetary perspective.