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Unique measurements and realistic simulations to advance research on turbulent clouds / Meteorology professor at Freie Universität Berlin studies the connection between clouds and climate change
Fabian Hoffmann began his position as Professor for General Meteorology at Freie Universität Berlin’s Institute of Meteorology in October 2025. His research focuses on the physics of clouds at various scales, including microphysics, dynamics, and the role of clouds in Earth’s climate system. Before coming to Freie Universität, Hoffmann led an Emmy Noether junior research group at the Meteorological Institute at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
The European Research Council (ERC) has just announced that it will be awarding Hoffmann an ERC Synergy Grant for the project “The Role of Turbulence in the Physics of Clouds (TurPhyCloud),” which includes scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (Germany), the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), and Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands). The team will receive a total budget of 13.7 million euros for the next six years – 2.5 million euros of which Professor Hoffmann will be able to use to fund his work at Freie Universität Berlin.
Advancing Weather and Climate Forecasting
Changes in Earth’s cloud cover may amplify rather than mitigate global warming, but the magnitude of this is highly uncertain. Earth’s dominant cloud type per area covered is stratocumulus. These low-level, shallow, and horizontally spread-out clouds cover one-fifth of the Earth’s surface. One of the greatest challenges in climate science today is to predict how clouds in general, and stratocumulus clouds in particular, will change in a warming world.
The project “The Role of Turbulence in the Physics of Clouds (TurPhyCloud)” brings together experts from the fields of experimental physics, theoretical physics, and meteorology to address the full range of processes governing the formation of these clouds across scales, with particular attention to the role of turbulence. In addition to Professor Hoffmann himself, the interdisciplinary group of researchers includes Professor Eberhard Bodenschatz (Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen), Professor Bernhard Mehlig (University of Gothenburg), and Professor Pier Siebesma (Delft University of Technology). The mix of backgrounds and expertise within the team reflects the nature of ERC Synergy Grants – they are awarded to interdisciplinary groups of researchers to address research problems that could lead to breakthroughs not possible by the individual researchers working alone.
Over the course of two field campaigns at the Utö Atmospheric and Marine Research Station in the Baltic Sea, the team will conduct extremely high-resolution measurements to capture the full complexity of stratocumulus clouds – from processes on the kilometer scale all the way down to the micrometer scale. From this information, the researchers plan to develop statistical models of turbulent processes in cloud physics that surpass conventional simulations in accuracy and resolution.
“Our goal is to develop a new simulation model that is guided and validated by the results of the field campaigns,” Hoffmann explains. The simulation will then be embedded in weather and climate models. “Through this combination of unique measurements with realistic simulations, TurPhyCloud will make significant contributions to the advancement of climate projections and weather predictions,” says Hoffmann.
Climate Expert Professor Fabian Hoffmann
Professor Hoffmann studied meteorology at Leibniz University Hannover, where he also completed his doctorate. He was a CIRES Visiting Fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and an Emmy Noether junior research group leader at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. In addition to Hoffmann’s theoretical research on cloud physics – from rain initiation to aerosol-cloud-climate interactions, he has also developed a highly detailed representation of cloud microphysics using high-resolution large-eddy simulations with Lagrangian cloud microphysics. Among his many accolades, Hoffmann is also the recipient of the German Meteorological Society’s prestigious Young Scientist Award (Förderpreis). He is a member of the International Commission on Clouds and Precipitation and actively contributes to several international research partnerships with, for example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Prof. Dr. Fabian Hoffmann, Institute of Meteorology, Freie Universität Berlin, Email: f.hoffmann@fu-berlin.de
Fabian Hoffmann is researching clouds and their role in climate change.
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Fabian Hoffmann is researching clouds and their role in climate change.
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