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Nature 413, 586-587 (11 October 2001) | doi:10.1038/35098178

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Cloud physics: Inside history on droplets

Marcia Baker

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Upper-tropospheric clouds contain ice particles, most of which result from the freezing of liquid droplets. That freezing, it emerges, is far more complicated than had been thought.

Clouds in the troposphere, the atmospheric layer between the ground and the stratosphere, have profound influences on air chemistry, weather and global climate. Many of the particles in these clouds originate as small droplets that grow by condensation of water vapour as the droplets rise in the atmosphere.