ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Aerosols enhance cloud lifetime and brightness along the stratus-to-cumulus transition.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Reply to Yu et al.: Meteorological covariations do not reproduce diurnal cloud fraction response to aerosol.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Challenges in global climate models to represent cloud response to aerosols: insights from volcanic eruptions.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Cloud fraction response to aerosol driven by nighttime processes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Turbulence-induced droplet grouping and augmented rain formation in cumulus clouds.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Physical science research needed to evaluate the viability and risks of marine cloud brightening.Science advances · 2024Review
- Reconstructing aerosol optical depth using spatiotemporal Long Short-Term Memory convolutional autoencoder.Scientific data · 2023Article
- Observational evidence of strong forcing from aerosol effect on low cloud coverage.Science advances · 2023Article
- Article
- Phytoplankton Impact on Marine Cloud Microphysical Properties Over the Northeast Atlantic Ocean.Journal of geophysical research. Atmospheres : JGR · 2022Article
- Opportunistic experiments to constrain aerosol effective radiative forcing.Atmospheric chemistry and physics · 2022Article
- Realism of Lagrangian Large Eddy Simulations Driven by Reanalysis Meteorology: Tracking a Pocket of Open Cells Under a Biomass Burning Aerosol Layer.Journal of advances in modeling earth systems · 2021Article
- Harmonized and high-quality datasets of aerosol optical depth at a US continental site, 1997-2018.Scientific data · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Anthropogenic aerosols are hypothesized to enhance planetary albedo and offset some of the warming due to the buildup of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere. Aerosols can enhance the coverage, reflectance, and lifetime of warm low-level clouds. However, the relationship between cloud lifetime and aerosol concentration has been challenging to measure from polar orbiting satellites. We estimate two timescales relating to the formation and persistence of low-level clouds over [Formula: see text] spatial domains using multiple years of geostationary satellite observations provided by the Clouds and Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) Synoptic (SYN) product. Lagrangian trajectories spanning several days along the classic stratus-to-cumulus transition zone are stratified by aerosol optical depth and meteorology. Clouds forming in relatively polluted trajectories tend to have lighter precipitation rates, longer average lifetime, and higher cloud albedo and cloud fraction compared with unpolluted trajectories. While liquid water path differences are found to be negligible, we find direct evidence of increased planetary albedo primarily through increased drop concentration ([Formula: see text]) and cloud fraction, with the caveat that the aerosol influence on cloud fraction is positive only for stable atmospheric conditions. While the increase in cloud fraction can be large typically in the beginning of trajectories, the Twomey effect accounts for the bulk (roughly 3/4) of the total aerosol indirect radiative forcing estimate.
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