Emerging approaches to assessing aerosol-cloud interactions in warm marine boundary layer clouds

In this talk we will review some of the challenges associated with aerosol effects on the low cloud system. We will focus on 3 key themes: (i) a shift from specificity to generality, i.e., from basic aerosol-cloud microphysical processes to broader coupled system responses, which has been facilitated by improvements in model fidelity and observational capacity; (ii) emerging approaches to comparing models and observations in geophysical state spaces that yield insights into aerosol-cloud processes; and (iii) the importance of the timescales associated with system adjustments to aerosol and meteorological perturbations. We will discuss new modeling and observational results that address all three themes.