Invisible Ship Tracks: What can we learn about the aerosol effect on clouds and climate from previously unseen ship-polluted clouds?

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• Peter Manshausen (University of Oxford)
• Wednesday 07 December 2022, 15:00-16:00
• Unilever Lecture Hall (and zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86500676542?pwd=NTFuNnpJQ1orMzZtem10cFNySjJiZz09 )).

If you have a question about this talk, please contact lj384.

Aerosols, e.g. soot, dust, etc., provide the condensation nuclei around which cloud droplets form. By burning fossil fuels, humans have drastically increased the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere. More aerosols lead to more cloud droplets, which make the clouds more reflective, thereby cooling the planet and partly counteracting greenhouse gas-induced heating. But the magnitude of this effect is poorly constrained and the effect of aerosols on the amount of water in a cloud, which is also important for its reflectivity, is uncertain. It is hard to experiment on a system of the size of clouds or weather systems, so studies rely on opportunistic experiments, like a ship emitting aerosol into marine clouds along its path. This leads to lines of more reflective clouds that were discovered in some of the first satellite images in the 60s. Comparing the polluted and the unpolluted parts can help to quantify the effect of anthropogenic aerosols more generally. However, fewer than 2% of ships leave visible ship tracks behind. Are these tracks representative of the effect of aerosols on clouds in other regions and under other meteorological conditions? Why are some of them visible and others are not? And is there no effect when we cannot see a track?

This talk is part of the Centre for Atmospheric Science seminars, Chemistry Dept. series.

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