Aerosols: When scents influence our climate

One of the great unknowns in climate models is the behavior of certain gases that often smell strongly and cause water to condense. TU Wien (Vienna) is providing new insights into this. It has long been clear that man-made greenhouse gases are changing the climate - but there are still important details of climate change that are not well understood. These include the behavior of tiny particles that form all by themselves from molecules in the air and can lead to the formation of clouds. Dominik Stolzenburg of the Institute of Materials Chemistry at TU Wien is working to better understand these processes and now summarizes the current state of research in a review article in the prestigious journal Reviews of Modern Physics. This research should make climate models even more accurate in the future. Fragrant gases become mini-particles "You know this from a walk in the woods: you take a deep breath and it smells really nice like a forest," says Dominik Stolzenburg.