Built to close a long-standing gap
in cloud measurement.
RepliClouds was not founded to build a better product for its own sake. It was founded to close a measurement gap the atmospheric science community had long worked around — and to replace it with an instrument that is honest about the conditions inside a real cloud.
Why the particles you can't see decide the weather you get.
Every cloud starts with something invisible — and measuring it accurately is one of the clearest ways to sharpen the forecasts the world depends on.
Every cloud begins with a particle too small to see — a speck of sea spray, dust, or smoke — onto which water vapour condenses to form a droplet. These seeds are called cloud condensation nuclei, and without them there would be no clouds and no rain.
Measuring them accurately matters because the way these particles interact with clouds is the single largest source of uncertainty in climate projections. Those measurements need to mimic real atmospheric conditions as closely as possible, which instruments of the conventional design cannot do. The HCCNC, developed at Atmospheric Physics Group at ETH Zurich, measures far closer to the conditions under which clouds actually form.
Better data on these particles feeds better cloud and climate models — and clouds drive almost everything the weather throws at us: rainfall and drought, hail, thunderstorms, floods, and the timing of the monsoon.
From a flow channel to a farmer's field.
One example of how a single measurement ripples outward — from an instrument in the lab to consequences felt on a global scale.
Three kinds of impact, from one instrument.
Scientific Precision
The HCCNC is engineered to access measurement ranges no available instrument could reach before, providing data the scientific community needs to address the largest remaining source of climate uncertainty.
Social Equity
Sharper climate models produce sharper forecasts. Deploying the HCCNC with research institutions will enable field campaigns that capture critical data from climate-vulnerable regions — building the observational foundation that long-term resilience planning depends on.
Environmental Responsibility
The core of each HCCNC (its plates) is manufactured by selective laser melting (3D printing), a metal additive process that wastes under 1 % of material — compared with up to 90 % for conventional CNC machining.
"To build instruments that make the atmosphere legible — so that science, and the world it serves, can see clearly."