Figure of the quarter: Winter 2020

Figure. Maps of the increase in sulfate pollution since the Industrial Revolution (red) and how Earth’s energy budget has been perturbed as a result of interactions between clouds and that pollution (blue). More negative values of the effective radiative forcing due to aerosol-cloud interactions (ERFaci) means more of a cooling effect from pollution that has offset some of the warming due to greenhouse gas emissions.

For this figure, the increase in sulfate comes from “historical” (1850-2015) runs of the latest generation of state-of-the-art climate models (CMIP6) and the ERFaci is estimated using cloud-aerosol relationships derived from an analysis of a shipping corridor in the southeast Atlantic Ocean. For reference, the radiative forcing today from increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations is ~3 W/m2.

For more information, check out our (open-access!) paper in AGU Advances:

Diamond, Michael, H. Director, R. Eastman, A. Possner, & R. Wood (2020). Substantial Cloud Brightening from Shipping in Subtropical Low Clouds. AGU Advances, 1(1), e2019AV000111. doi:10.1029/2019av000111

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