Study of aerosols stands to improve climate models

摘要

CLOUDS over the southern Indian Ocean. This image was acquired by one of the northward-viewing cameras of the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument on NASA's polar-orbiting Terra spacecraft. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech Aerosols, tiny particles in the atmosphere, play a significant role in Earth's climate, scattering and absorbing incoming sunlight and affecting the formation and properties of clouds. Currently, the effect that these aerosols have on clouds represents the largest uncertainty among all influences on climate change. But now researchers from Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have provided a global observational study of the effect that changes in aerosol levels have on low-level marine clouds—the clouds that have the largest impact on the amount of incoming sunlight that Earth reflects back into space. The findings appear online in Nature Geoscience.