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- Title
Aerosol effects on clouds are concealed by natural cloud heterogeneity and satellite retrieval errors.
- Authors
Arola, Antti; Lipponen, Antti; Kolmonen, Pekka; Virtanen, Timo H.; Bellouin, Nicolas; Grosvenor, Daniel P.; Gryspeerdt, Edward; Quaas, Johannes; Kokkola, Harri
- Abstract
One major source of uncertainty in the cloud-mediated aerosol forcing arises from the magnitude of the cloud liquid water path (LWP) adjustment to aerosol-cloud interactions, which is poorly constrained by observations. Many of the recent satellite-based studies have observed a decreasing LWP as a function of cloud droplet number concentration (CDNC) as the dominating behavior. Estimating the LWP response to the CDNC changes is a complex task since various confounding factors need to be isolated. However, an important aspect has not been sufficiently considered: the propagation of natural spatial variability and errors in satellite retrievals of cloud optical depth and cloud effective radius to estimates of CDNC and LWP. Here we use satellite and simulated measurements to demonstrate that, because of this propagation, even a positive LWP adjustment is likely to be misinterpreted as negative. This biasing effect therefore leads to an underestimate of the aerosol-cloud-climate cooling and must be properly considered in future studies.The authors showed that previous analyses which have estimated that the cloud water content decreases with increasing number of cloud droplets may have a negative bias due to variability in satellite data, thus underestimating aerosol-cloud-climate cooling.
- Publication
Nature Communications, 2022, Vol 13, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
2041-1723
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1038/s41467-022-34948-5