Preface.- Authors and affiliations.- Background.- The atmosphere - vast, shallow, and full of subtleties.- Chemical composition of the atmosphere.- Aerosols in the atmosphere.- Earth's radiation budget - the driver for weather and climate.- Light scattering by molecules in the atmosphere.- 5 Greenhouse effect, radiative forcing and climate sensitivity.- Thunderstorms thermodynamics.- Thunderstorms - trace species generator.- Ice supersaturation.- Atmospheric ice formation processes.- Detection and analysis of water vapor transport.- Long-range transport of air pollutants.- Atmospheric acoustics.- Aircraft wake vortices - from fundamental research to operational application.- Contrails - a visible aviation induced climate impact.- Methods.-Measurements of nitrogen oxides and related trace gases.- Chemical ionization mass spectrometric measurements of atmospheric trace gases.- In-situ measurement methods for atmospheric aerosol particles and cloud elements.- Dropsondes and radiosondes for atmospheric measurements.- Lightning detection.- Cloud and precipitation radar.- Weather nowcasting and short term forecasting.- Lagrangian modeling of transport and dispersion of air constituents.- Radiative transfer - methods and applications.- Ice cloud properties from space.- Contrail detection in satellite images.- Lidar for aerosol remote sensing.- Measuring water vapor with differential absorption lidar.- Aerosol classification by advanced backscatter lidar techniques.- Wind lidar for atmospheric research.- Tunable light sources for lidar applications.- Advanced numerical modeling of turbulent atmospheric flows.- Cloud resolving modeling of the evolution of contrails.- Global atmospheric aerosol modeling.- Earth system modeling.- Evaluating climate-chemistry response and mitigation options with AirClim.- Research trends.- The transition from FALCON to HALO era airborne atmospheric research.- The Eyjafjalla eruption in 2010 and the volcanic impact on aviation.- Mitigating the impact of adverse weather on aviation.- Probabilistic weather forecasting.-Aircraft emissions at cruise and plume processes.- Cirrus clouds and their model representation.- Climate impact of transport.- Climate optimized air transport.- Recent and future evolution of the stratospheric ozone layer.- How good are chemistry-climate models?.- Methane modeling - from process modeling to global climate models.- Towards a greenhouse gas lidar in space.- The space-borne wind lidar mission ADM-Aeolus.- Cloud-aerosol-radiation interaction - towards the EarthCARE satellite mission.- Roots, foundation, and achievements of the "Institut für Physik der Atmosphäre".- Keywords and cross-references.- Acronyms and abbreviations.- Constants and units