Smoke particles can affect Earth’s radiation budget by absorbing and reflecting radiation directly and by changing cloud properties via their effect on atmospheric temperature and circulation and by seeding additional cloud droplets. Each of these aerosol radiative effects can be large in magnitude but often have offsetting cooling and warming influences.
My group has focused on one particularly interesting area for studying smoke-cloud interactions: the southeast Atlantic Ocean, where a large smoke plume from agricultural burning in south-central Africa overlies and mixes into a large deck of stratocumulus clouds. We have studied the region using a combination of observations from recent field campaigns and numerical modeling from climate to cloud scales.
Diamond group @ Florida State 