Dr. Igel is a frequent users of High-Performance Core Computing Facility. Her research group works on observing and analyzing aerosol-cloud interaction, specifically in the Arctic studying phenomena like fog and thunderstorms. To help model these interactions more efficiently, they are working on improving the codes used to represent cloud processes in weather and climate models. To forecast weather patterns, there are many equations involved for all aspects of the weather–they have to take into account things like clouds, sunlight, water vapor, temperature, how the atmosphere interacts with the land surface, and more. These are very complicated equations with thousands of lines of code, so to produce better forecasts at higher speeds, these calculations are broken up into different parts and run simultaneously on hundreds of different cores. While Dr. Igel’s current project is of a smaller scale, larger forecasts in the climate community often require computations to span thousands of cores for the simulations.