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Substantial Cloud Brightening from Shipping in Subtropical Low Clouds
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  • Michael Diamond,
  • Hannah Director,
  • Ryan Eastman,
  • Anna Possner,
  • Robert Wood
Michael Diamond
University of Washington

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Hannah Director
University of Washington
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Ryan Eastman
University of Washington
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Anna Possner
Goethe University in Frankfurt
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Robert Wood
University of Washington
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Abstract

The influence of aerosol particles on cloud reflectivity remains one of the largest sources of uncertainty in our understanding anthropogenic climate change. Commercial shipping constitutes a large and concentrated aerosol perturbation in a meteorological regime where clouds have a disproportionally large effect on climate. Yet, to date, studies have been unable to detect climatologically-relevant cloud radiative effects from shipping, despite models indicating that the cloud response should produce a sizable negative radiative forcing (perturbation to Earth’s energy balance). We attribute a significant increase in cloud reflectivity to enhanced cloud droplet number concentrations within a major shipping corridor in the southeast Atlantic. Prevailing winds constrain emissions around the corridor, which cuts through a climatically-important region of expansive low-cloud cover. We use universal kriging, a classic geostatistical method, to estimate what cloud properties would have been in the absence of shipping. In the morning, cloud brightening is consistent with changes in microphysics alone, whereas in the afternoon, increases in cloud brightness from microphysical changes are offset by decreases in the total amount of cloud water. We find a radiative forcing in the southeast Atlantic shipping corridor two orders of magnitude greater than previous observational estimates. Approximately five years of data are required to identify a clear signal. Extrapolating our results globally, we calculate an effective radiative forcing due to aerosol-cloud interactions in low clouds of -0.62 W/m2 (-1.23 to -0.08 W/m2). The unique setup in the southeast Atlantic could be an ideal test for the representation of aerosol-cloud interactions in climate models.
Mar 2020Published in AGU Advances volume 1 issue 1. 10.1029/2019AV000111