Congratulations to Masters->PhD student Lili Boss on her successful thesis defense! Lili’s work used a statistical technique called universal kriging to look at how clouds changed over a major shipping corridor in the southeast Atlantic Ocean after the International Maritime Organization implemented strict new marine fuel pollution limits in 2020. She found that while ship pollution increased the number of cloud droplets that formed and led to substantially brightened clouds before the IMO 2020 regulations, after the fuel limits the ship pollution effects were much weaker, leading to an overall cloud darkening (warming) effect. Lili also showed that changes in the amount of clouds that form were affected by ship pollution as well, although the effect differed for drizzling and non-drizzling clouds and the available data post-2020 was too noisy to draw firm conclusions about changes.
Diamond group @ Florida State 