Untangling causality in midlatitude aerosol–cloud adjustments

McCoy, Daniel T.; Field, Paul; Gordon, Hamish; Elsaesser, Gregory S.; Grosvenor, Daniel P.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-4085-2020

Articles | Volume 20, issue 7

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-4085-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-4085-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 20, issue 7

Research article

|

06 Apr 2020

Research article |

| 06 Apr 2020

Untangling causality in midlatitude aerosol–cloud adjustments

Daniel T. McCoy, Paul Field, Hamish Gordon, Gregory S. Elsaesser, and Daniel P. Grosvenor

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-4085-2020-supplement

Data sets

MERRA-2 tavg1_2d_slv_Nx: 2d,1-Hourly,Time-Averaged,Single-Level,Assimilation,Single-Level Diagnostics V5.12.4 Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) https://doi.org/10.5067/VJAFPLI1CSIV

Geostationary Enhanced Temporal Interpolation for CERES Flux Products (https://ceres.larc.nasa.gov/order_data.php) D. R. Doelling, N. G. Loeb, D. F. Keyes, M. L. Nordeen, D. Morstad, C. Nguyen, B. A. Wielicki, D. F. Young, and M. Sun https://doi.org/10.1175/jtech-d-12-00136.1

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Short summary

Incomplete understanding of how aerosol affects clouds degrades our ability to predict future climate. In particular, it is unclear how aerosol affects the lifetime of clouds. Does it increase or decrease it? This confusion is partially because causality flows from aerosol to clouds and clouds to aerosol, and it is hard to tell what is happening in observations. Here, we use simulations to tell us about how clouds affect aerosol and use this to interpret observations, showing increased lifetime.