Aerosol-cloud-climate cooling overestimated by ship-track data
Making tracks
The magnitude of the effect of anthropogenic aerosols on the formation of clouds is an important unknown about how humans are affecting climate. Studies of stratocumulus cloud tracks that are formed by ship exhaust have been used to estimate the radiative impact of this process, but Glassmeier et al. now show that this approach overestimates the cooling effect of aerosol addition by up to 200%. These findings underscore the need to quantify stratocumulus cloud responses to anthropogenic aerosols to understand the climate system.
Science, this issue p. 485
Abstract
The effect of anthropogenic aerosol on the reflectivity of stratocumulus cloud decks through changes in cloud amount is a major uncertainty in climate projections. In frequently occurring nonprecipitating stratocumulus, cloud amount can decrease through aerosol-enhanced cloud-top mixing. The climatological relevance of this effect is debated because ship exhaust only marginally reduces stratocumulus amount. By comparing detailed numerical simulations with satellite analyses, we show that ship-track studies cannot be generalized to estimate the climatological forcing of anthropogenic aerosol. The ship track–derived sensitivity of the radiative effect of nonprecipitating stratocumulus to aerosol overestimates their cooling effect by up to 200%. The offsetting warming effect of decreasing stratocumulus amount needs to be taken into account if we are to constrain the cloud-mediated radiative forcing of anthropogenic aerosol.
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Supplementary Material
Summary
Materials and Methods
Supplementary Text
Figs. S1 to S6
Tables S1 to S4
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References and Notes
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Science
Volume 371 | Issue 6528
29 January 2021
29 January 2021
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.
This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.
Submission history
Received: 23 June 2020
Accepted: 22 December 2020
Published in print: 29 January 2021
Acknowledgments
F.G. thanks A. Possner and T. Goren for helpful discussions about the interpretation of satellite literature. M. Khairoutdinov graciously provided the System for Atmospheric Modeling (SAM) model. The University of Wyoming, Department of Atmospheric Science, is acknowledged for archiving the radiosonde data. We thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Funding: F.G. acknowledges support from The Branco Weiss Fellowship – Society in Science, administered by the ETH Zürich, and from a Veni grant of the Dutch Research Council (NWO). F.H. held a visiting fellowship of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, and is supported by the German Research Foundation under grant HO 6588/1-1. J.S.J. and K.S.C. were supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) under grant NE/I020059/1 (ACID-PRUF) and the UK-China Research and Innovation Partnership Fund through the Met Office Climate Science for Service Partnership (CSSP) China as part of the Newton Fund. K.S.C. is currently a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holder. This research was partially supported by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research of the U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric System Research Program Interagency Agreement DE-SC0016275 and by an Earth’s Radiation Budget grant, NOAA CPO Climate & CI #03-01-07-001. Author contributions: F.G., G.F., and F.H. conceived the study; F.G. developed the emulator with support from J.S.J. and K.S.C.; T.Y. performed the simulations. All authors contributed to the final product. Competing interests: All authors declare that they have no competing interests. Data and materials availability: Simulation data are available from https://esrl.noaa.gov/csl/groups/csl9/datasets/data/cloud_phys/2020-Glassmeier-etal/. Radiosonde data can be acccessed at http://www.weather.uwyo.edu/upperair/sounding.html.
Authors
Funding Information
U.S. Department of Energy: DE-SC0016275
Newton Fund: CSSP
Newton Fund: CSSP
NOAA Research: CI #03-01-07-001
Natural Environment Research Council: NE/I020059/1
Natural Environment Research Council: NE/I020059/1
Royal Society: Wolfson Research Merit Award
The Branco Weiss Fellowship:
CIRES, University of Colorado:
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: HO 6588/1-1
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