Dr. Assia Arouf is broadly interested in Earth's climate system, with a focus on clouds. Her research aims to better understand the cloud radiative effect and cloud feedback. She typically works with satellite observations, in combination with radiative transfer codes and climate models, aiming to improve climate projections.
Dr. Arouf recently began a postdoc at CCSR and NASA-GISS supported by NOAA and NASA projects. Assia’s research focus on low-cloud feedback, which represents the greatest source of uncertainty in climate projections on the centennial scale. Most specifically, she aims to evaluate and constrain stratocumulus (Sc) and shallow cumulus (Cu) cloud feedbacks in climate models using satellite observations to ultimately reduce their contribution to the spread in equilibrium climate sensitivity. In parallel, she is investigating the observed relationship between the Sc and Cu cloud covers to the primary low-cloud controlling factors (sea surface temperature, estimated inversion strength, wind speed and lower tropospheric relative humidity) using satellite observations and reanalysis data. Moreover, she will constrain Sc and Cu cloud feedback in climate models, mainly the NASA-GISS model.
In 2019, Dr. Arouf started her PhD in Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD) and Sorbonne University (Paris) focused on developing a new observational-derived product of surface longwave cloud radiative effect using space lidar observation (CALIPSO) and radiative transfer simulations. She used this product to quantify the increase of surface longwave cloud warming in response to Arctic sea ice loss and investigated how clouds may delay sea ice freeze up latter into Fall. Before her PhD, she did her master in Fundamentals of Remote Sensing at Université Paris Cité in France.