How to represent clouds in models?

Clouds are one of the most important components of the atmosphere. They interact with solar and infrared radiation, thus influencing the energy budget of the Earth-Atmosphere system, and determine the hydrological cycle. However, our knowledge about cloud pro-cesses is still limited, also in the sense that there is no “general theory of clouds”, which makes it difficult to represent clouds in models in a meaningful or even consistent way. In the talk I will give a short overview about common approaches to represent cloud pro-cesses in models on different scales, and also some new results and ideas for consistent cloud models.