Welcome to the ExOb- web-blog! The ExOb group is us, Scientists, PhD-students, and students from the „Exploiting Observations in Meteorology“-group of the Institute for Geophysics and Meteorology of the University of Cologne. With this weblog, we would like to give you some insights into our working life besides preparing some exercises for students and correcting their homework. It is mending to show you how attractive (or perhaps sometimes also boring) life as a scientist can be.

The main focus of our research is observing the so-called atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). A phrase not many people know, however, potentially that more than 99% of all of us live in this atmospheric layer. The ABL is the meteorological term describing the atmosphere’s lowest 1-2 km. The layer links the surface to the atmosphere and many of processes, e.g. heat or pollution transport, that originate in the ABL to the atmosphere above, where they influence other processes, e.g. triggering cloud and precipitation formation.

The goal of the ExOb group is to perform research on new meteorological observation systems and investigate if and how these can improve our knowledge on the structure of the ABL, e.g. temperature, humidity and winds. Developing such methods can help us shed light on the physical processes in the ABL, such as turbulent fluxes or cloud and precipitation formation. Also, we investigate the impact of these observational methods on short-term weather forecasts and high-resolution re-analyses.

So we are happy to show you more about what we are doing soon. Feel free to visit also our working group homepage