Sometimes, all it takes is a single picture to put into context the complexity of a given object, idea, question, or problem. The image below captures a little bit of everything the ORACLES team is trying to study: smoke, aerosols, clouds, and inheterogeneties within. One of the biggest challenges - especially for my end of the project - is to figure out when/how much of this biomass burning layer/smoke/aerosol is interacting with the clouds below. Cloud properties - cloud drop sizes, number concentration, radar reflectivity - as well as retrieved rainfall are all known to differ between "clean" and "polluted" regimes. Structurally, the clouds appear similar, especially in this image... but between the "thin" and "thick" layers, to what degree to cloud/aerosol interactions actually matter for these quantities? (Ping me again in another year or two... hopefully I'll have "some" answer to this :) ).