Louise Nuijens

I am an associate professor in the Geoscience & Remote Sensing Department at TU Delft since 2017 and an ECMWF Fellow since 2019. My research focuses on deciphering convection, clouds and precipitation and their role in large-scale weather and climate. I am also very interested in air-sea interaction and excited to gain a broader ocean perspective by joining a new US CLIVAR working group on small-scale ocean processes. Before coming to TUD, I worked as a Postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Earth, Atmosphere and Planetary Sciences at MIT in Boston , and as a group leader of the Observations and Process Studies group in the Atmosphere Department of the Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. I received my Masters degree in Meteorology from the Wageningen University and Research Center in the Netherlands and my PhD in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). [full CV]

Originally from Cesena, I graduated in Aerospace Engineering from University of Bologna. My education encompassed a wide range of topics, but I found aerodynamics and turbulence the most fascinating. Thus, I carried out my Master’s thesis at KTH in Stockholm, where I focused on the direct numerical simulation of turbulent boundary layers. In addition to my interest in transitional flows and their control, I became increasingly intrigued by the physics of atmospheric flows and their role in global challenges. In light of this, I moved to Delft where I began a PhD on Air-Sea interactions. Here, I will delve into the processes and mechanisms that govern the sub-mesoscale regime, focusing on convective clouds, winds and how they affect the ocean surface. The primary method of my investigation is large eddy simulations, but I will also work in synergy with spaceborne and in-situ measurements.

I will start my PhD at TU Delft in November 2020 within the CMTRACE project. Previous to this, I received my Masters degree in Environmental Engineering from the same university, defending a thesis titled ‘Convective cloud parameterization: Evaluation of the mass-flux approach through observations.’ I also have been working for nine months within the CloudBrake project, focusing on assessing wind biases in the trade wind region. In particular I have been using observations from the EUREC4A field campaign to investigate diurnality and magnitude of wind biases at the mesoscale. Within the CMTRACE project I will work on identifying mechanisms underlying convective momentum transport (CMT), in particular the relationships between CMT and cloud friction.

Since my undergrad in Physics at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (2007-2011, Brazil), I became interested in the observational component of atmospheric sciences. During my master in Meteorology at the National Institute For Space Research (2012-2014, Brazil), I developed a methodology for calibrating long-wave radiation sensors and correcting their data. During my PhD in Meteorology at the University of Cologne, I used triple-frequency cloud radars and radar Doppler spectra observations for investigating the formation of snow aggregates in Ice and snow clouds. In my current position as PostDoc, I am focused on studying turbulence in the atmospheric boundary layer and investigating how it relates to the occurrence of clouds. For that, I am using the synergy of wind lidar and cloud radars to retrieve wind profiles in the cloud and sub-cloud layers.