The
Pi Chamber, Dow Environmental Sciences and Engineering Building 105, generates clouds under just about any conditions. Furthermore, it can generate clouds in a turbulent environment, and it can sustain them indefinitely, making long-time observation or averaging possible. The clouds don’t include the full complexity of the atmosphere, and that is exactly the point!
In this laboratory environment, clouds can be reduced to their most elementary features, and unlike in the atmosphere, can be generated with known conditions and controlled aerosols or pollutants, and can be held in steady conditions. This allows us to ask specific questions and to study them in a repeatable way, and to compare the results to theoretical and computational models, which can then be extended to the full context of the atmosphere.