Water: Climate’s Great Orchestrator

The mighty water molecule, with its voracious appetite for infrared radiation, is responsible for much of what we know about climate and climate change, and even more of what we don’t know. Trapped for most of its life in large surface reservoirs, every few thousand years it escapes to the atmosphere for a short sojourn of a little over a week, during which it helps to create, quite literally, the world as we know it.

About the Speaker

Bjorn B. Stevens, Ph.D. leads the department “The Atmosphere in the Earth System” as well as the International Max Planck Research School on Earth System Modelling at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology.

Prof. Stevens has published ground-breaking research papers dealing with the theory, modelling and observation of “low” clouds, which is one of the most important problems in meteorology and climate research.