The rapid increase in global warming in 2023 has sparked fears that Earth has entered a new warm state. Possible explanations for a warming spike have included transient changes in radiative forcing or deficiencies in climate models. This study shows that the primary cause is a mode of natural climate variability – the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The authors show that, while the magnitude of global warming caused by ENSO was particularly large in 2023, it is not unprecedented in the historical record. The implication is that global warming is continuing at a steady average rate without dramatic acceleration.

The core element of climate change is the sensitivity of the Earth's climate system to the balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing terrestrial radiation at the top of the atmosphere. CO2 is one of the key atmospheric parameters controlling the outgoing longwave radiation. In this paper, hyper-spectral satellite data of the outgoing long wave radiation from a decade of observations are successfully used for the first time to disentangle the radiative effect of CO2 increase from those of other relevant parameters such as temperature and water vapour variations. The paper demonstrates convincingly that the observed radiative changes agree excellently with theoretical predictions of outgoing long wave radiation changes due to the observed CO2 increase. While solely based on observations from space, these results confirm a fundamental theoretical underpinning of the science of global warming.

There is a very strong contrast between water vapor concentrations in the stratosphere (dry) and the troposphere (moist). Climate models typically represent this contrast poorly and suffer from a ‘moist bias’ in the extratropical lower stratosphere. Here two versions of a particular model, one a standard version and the other with a different transport scheme which greatly reduces the moist bias, are used to give a clear demonstration of its effect, through the radiative effects of water vapor, on the regional-scale tropospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere Pacific region. The authors then show that differences in moist bias explain differences in this circulation across a large set of climate models. Improvements in transport schemes and hence better representation of the troposphere-stratosphere contrast in water vapor are likely to improve important regional scale features of the tropospheric circulation.

The paper exploits recent in-situ observations of water vapour in the lower stratosphere in the StratoClim campaign which was focused on the Asian Monsoon region, accepted as very important as providing a pathway from troposphere to stratosphere for important chemical species. The paper uses trajectory modelling to argue that, whilst very large water vapour concentrations were observed in some locations, significant further dehydration is likely as the air masses are transported, over tens of days, on a spiralling path into the main body of the stratosphere. The conclusion is therefore that these large water vapour concentrations do not imply a substantial moistening of the stratosphere. There has been a long-standing debate about the role of processes on different scales, from the cloud-scale to the regional scale, in controlling stratospheric water vapour, which has an important effect on the radiative balance of the troposphere. In combining in-situ data and trajectory modelling this study should help progress towards scientific consensus on this point.

Ship tracks are enhanced regions of cloud brightness that trail behind ships that are known to be created by their effluent. They are widely used as observational test beds to deepen understanding of how pollution might affect cloud microphysical processes and climate at larger regional and global scales.  This study uses satellite observations of cloud properties and records of ship position and their effluent to assess perturbations from ship emissions on cloud droplet number and liquid water path. The study found that, as expected, the droplet number perturbation in shiptracks scales with ship emission rates of aerosol particles. Surprisingly, however, the liquid water path in drizzling clouds increased by an amount that was nearly fixed. The observation points to novel non-linear threshold behaviours of relevance to representations of aerosol indirect effects in climate models.

In 2020, a new international law was imposed that placed strong restrictions on sulfur emissions from the international shipping industry. In addition to reducing air pollution, an anticipated side effect was reduction of the climate cooling effect that is often associated with "ship-tracks". Aerosol pollutant emissions from ships, when they rise into overlying clouds, lead to higher cloud droplet number concentrations, smaller cloud droplet sizes, and clouds that are more reflective to incoming sunlight, easily seen in satellite imagery as long bright lines downwind of ships. Past studies into whether the new law has led to darker clouds have been equivocal. For this study, the authors used sophisticated statistical techniques to compare cloud droplet size and reflectivity before and after the law was implemented focusing on a shipping corridor in the southeast Atlantic. They found strong evidence that droplet sizes have indeed increased, and that clouds have darkened with a significant local climate warming. Globally, the impact is much smaller, but may still represent an important consideration for assessments of the total summed effect of aerosols on climate.

Relative absence of something is often more difficult to quantify than its presence. This paper uses satellite observations and global model data to show that it is uncertainties in the quantification of clean-sky conditions that contribute most to current uncertainties in estimates of the sensitivity of cloud properties to varying degrees of aerosol loading. This is a novel result that should prove of broad interest to the aerosol-cloud-climate community for reframing how the problem is approached, by focusing on improved quantification of clean conditions.

The Southern Ocean can be considered a region exhibiting pristine conditions as during the pre-industrial time. Thus, any changes in radiative forcing in this region can be attributed to natural factors. Feedbacks of ocean biological activity on Earth’s radiation budget have been put forward as the CLAW hypothesis (Charlson et al., 1987, https://www.nature.com/articles/326655a0). It implies that emissions of biogenic sulfur-containing compounds result in the formation of cloud condensation nuclei, which lead to higher cloud droplet number concentrations. Such clouds are more reflective and thus lead to a cooling effect. The current study provides satellite-based evidence of the increase droplet number concentrations and cloud reflectivity (‘albedo’) triggered by chlorophyll emissions, as a proxy for biological activity. Specifically, it demonstrates for the first time the extent to which the cloud albedo is modulated by biological factors as a function of latitude along the Antarctic shelf. While the study does not extend to discussing the subsequent feedbacks of cloud reflectivity to biological activity, it clearly demonstrates how biological ocean activity affects cloudiness above the Southern Ocean and thus may regulate temperature.

Traditionally, the interactions between aerosols, clouds, weather and climate has focused on sulphate aerosols. However, in the last 20 years it has become apparent that secondary organic aerosols are also highly abundant in the troposphere. These could represent a major coupling in the earth system between the biosphere and the atmosphere, and thus climate because forests are known to emit large quantities of biogenic VOCs that are known to produce secondary organic aerosols. However selectively studying their influence on the free troposphere is difficult as it requires in situ measurements aboard scientific aircraft. This study observes the role of biogenic secondary organic aerosols on the abundance of cloud condensation nuclei in the upper troposphere above the Amazon, and compares it with a state-of-the-art predictive model. This further supports the importance of these processes in earth system models and gives confidence that the current level of understanding will produce accurate predictions.

Organic aerosol remain one of the more complex and hard to predict when studying atmospheric aerosols and their influences on air quality, meteorology and climate. Among its many complexities is the phase and viscosity of the organic matter, which dictates how it interacts with other particulate components and the gas phase, in turn affecting growth rates and cloud activation. There have been a number of previous works studying phase separation, where the organic matter becomes immiscible with an aqueous component (containing inorganic salts), but this new letter presents compelling visual evidence that different organic phases are also capable of separation. Different secondary organic aerosol (SOA) mixtures were created and some mixtures exhibited separation, with a factor being the oxygen-to-carbon ratio of the material, likely a surrogate for polarity. If this behaviour is found to be important in atmospheric aerosols this represents a new direction in how these may need to be represented in models.