The focus of the summer school was on convective organization and the possible feedback between organization and climate change. The background of this topic lies in very idealized simulations in which, without external forcings, convection spontaneously aggregates. It is not well understood why this happens and which processes influence this. During the school the focus was mainly on large scale processes and idealized simulations. This is not my own area of research, even though I also work on convective organization. It was therefore very interesting to learn more about the large scale point of view and discuss the similarities and differences between organization on a local and on a global scale.

The summer school was organized as follows. The rst week consisted of background lectures and lab sessions. In little groups we worked with data from RCEMIP simulations and focused on nding methods to quantify the degree of organization. This lab work also inspired me and gave me ideas to continue working on for my own project. In the second week many more speakers arrived. On Monday in the second week a colloquium was held which was open to the public. Three speakers (Sandrine Bony, Kerry Emanuel and Bjorn Stevens) spoke about 'three hot topics of climate change'. There was also a short poster session during this day where I presented my poster on convective organization of shallow convection. During the rest of the week debates were organized. Two speakers were each given an opinion about at certain topic and they had to defend this opinion. As participants we had to discuss and summarize these debates together with one of the speakers.

The group of participants was very international with people from all over the world. This created a great atmosphere, it was very informal and it was easy to get to know new people. I have met many great people and I look forward to meet some of them again at other conferences!

Thirza van Laar
PhD student
PhD project: "Spatial patterns in shallow cumulus cloud populations over a heterogeneous surface"
Institute of Geophysics and Meteorology
Characterization of the spatial distribution of cumulus clouds using large-domain
LES (poster)
http://indico.ictp.it/event/8669/