A journey through scale – from nanometers to kilometers

© Maximilian Dollner

Title of the project: Global distribution of coarse-mode aerosol and clouds during the Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom)
Name of the VDSP student: Maximilian Dollner
Project supervised by: Bernadett Weinzierl

I’m an experimental researcher at the Aerosol Physics and Environmental Physics Group at the UNIVIE. My interest in aerosol science started already in my 5th Bachelor semester, when I got the possibility to take part in an aircraft field campaign. Since then I remained true to aerosol research and gained 7 years of experience with more than 10 international aircraft field campaigns. On the private side, I enjoy spending time with my 2-year-old daughter, and love to be outside climbing, hiking, sailing or just going for a run.

Clouds cover most of our planet, but they also cover several magnitudes of scale: from nm up to km. The “birth” of a single cloud particle often starts with an aerosol particle a few tens or hundreds of nm in size. Droplets or ice crystals grow to sizes between a few µm up to several mm. They fall towards the ground with speeds in the order of cm/s, while they can be lifted to high altitudes by updrafts with speeds up to a few m/s. An innumerable amount of cloud particles together can form cloud systems with sizes up to hundreds of km. The photo and ice crystal images were taken during flights of the Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom), which is a core project of my dissertation. The campaign deployed the NASA DC-8 research aircraft four times around the world – once every season of the years. The measurements of the UNIVIE Cloud, Aerosol and Precipitation Spectrometer provide data about size and number concentration of aerosol and cloud particles as well as images of single particles. Part of my research investigates the global distribution and properties of clouds.

Weinzierl group