Dione Lee Rossiter, University of California, Santa Cruz • This Ph.D. student studies clouds, especially over the subtropical ocean—the area just north and south of the tropics. She's interested in their invisible physical changes, or microphysics, and a whole lot more.

Eleven days can go by in no time, but their brevity was accentuated for 27 graduate students at a summer colloquium on 1–12 June. The goal was to give students a taste of fieldwork by having them organize and conduct mini–field experiments and draw meaningful results from the data.

This spring the second Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment (VORTEX2, or V2) captured one tornado in unprecedented detail, as well as a number of potentially tornadic thunderstorms that never made the grade.

A team of NCAR researchers led by Jacob Fugal is developing and testing a specialized instrument that uses digital holography to measure tiny cloud droplets.

Using a highly efficient modeling technique, Pablo Ortiz (University of Granada) and Piotr Smolarkiewicz (ESSL/MMM) have simulated the role of winds in forming sand dunes and sandholes.