Daniel Rosenfeld will receive the 2018 Yoram J. Kaufman Outstanding Research and Unselfish Cooperation Award at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2018, to be held 10–14 December in Washington, D. C. The award recognizes “broad influence in atmospheric science through exceptional creativity, inspiration of younger scientists, mentoring, international collaborations, and unselfish cooperation in research.”  

Daniel Rosenfeld will receive the 2018 Yoram J. Kaufman Unselfish Cooperation in Research Award for his broad influence on atmospheric sciences and for describing the role of aerosol effects on convection and rainfall.

Danny was a pioneer in using theory and observations to explore aerosol and cloud interactions. His creativity is evidenced by a number of fundamental advances and paradigm shifts. He was the first to use field studies to show the suppression of warm rain by aerosols in smaller clouds, he proposed the theory of aerosol invigoration of clouds, and he discovered the strong impacts of aerosols on precipitation; he has made fundamental contributions to understanding cloud seeding by acquiring firsthand measurements of cloud physical quantities in severe convective clouds; he has proposed a novel geoengineering concept to weaken hurricane intensities through the addition of aerosols; and he initiated a joint International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme/World Climate Research Programme initiative to quantify our understanding of aerosol, clouds, precipitation, and climate. Danny demonstrated the dramatic differences in convection and rainfall for clouds ingesting relatively clean oceanic air with cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) concentrations near 100 per cubic centimeter and moderately polluted continental convection with CCN levels of the order of 1000 per cubic centimeter, versus pyrocumulus clouds involving orders of magnitude larger aerosol amounts. He has published provocative results outlining the effects of “weekend effects” of aerosols on summer rain and storm heights, as well as in lightning activity and tornadoes and hail.

Danny has worked with a wide range of scientists from the United States, Europe, China, India, and Brazil. He has cosupervised students from other countries and has worked with students visiting him at his institution, which demonstrate his unselfish collaboration in research.

As of July 2017, he has a record of almost 23,000 citations, which shows his vast influence in atmospheric sciences, particularly in the area of aerosol–cloud interactions. I am pleased to present the 2018 Yoram J. Kaufman Unselfish Cooperation in Research Award to Dr. Daniel Rosenfeld.

—Joyce E. Penner, President, Atmospheric Sciences Section, AGU

I am honored to receive the 2018 Kaufman Award from AGU, and I am thankful to the colleagues who supported this nomination. It is humbling to join the highly respectable list of previous awardees. I had the privilege to work closely with Yoram Kaufman on satellite remote sensing of cloud–aerosol interactions and experience firsthand his spirit of outstanding research and unselfish cooperation. Yoram laid the foundations of satellite retrievals of aerosols from space. Terry Nakajima did the same for satellite retrievals of cloud composition, and he was the highly deserving previous recipient of the Kaufman Award. Standing on the shoulders of these two giants, I continued the research of cloud–aerosol interactions, which has become a major topic in understanding changes in Earth’s energy budget and hydrological cycle, both featuring prominently as major challenges in climate change. My home base has been always the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. But I have been fortunate to be able to cooperate and mentor graduate students and early-career scientists also in Asia, Europe, and the Americas and to see ideas that initially seemed to be far-fetched become mainstream as a result of this cooperation. For this I am thankful to my colleagues who invited me to interact directly and co-mentor early-career scientists within their groups, including Zhanqing Li (a past recipient of the Kaufman Award) from the University of Maryland; Xing Yu from Xian Bureau of Meteorology in China; Andi Andreae and Ulrich Pöschl from Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany; Renyi Zhang from Texas A&M University; and Kim Prather from the University of California, San Diego. It is this new generation of presently early-career scientists who are likely to overcome the challenges that uncertainties in cloud–aerosol interactions pose to us in understanding and quantifying climate change. —Daniel Rosenfeld, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

For seminal advances in discovering and understanding aerosol-cloud-precipitation-climate interactions.