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.

Strong reduction of sulfur emission from shipping since 2020 provides a rare opportunity to examine the response of climate system to anthropogenic forcing. Using a global climate model, this study estimates a global aerosol effective radiative forcing of 0.13 W m-2 from ship emission reduction. This emission reduction leads to a global mean warming of 0.04 K in 2020-2049 with larger warming at regional scales. The warming may not be evident at present day because of the climate variability, but can represent a significant fraction (17%) of the remaining warming to 1.5 K target.

Our understanding of the impact of aerosol particles on deep-convective clouds is still incomplete. Earlier research found increased lightning above shipping lanes and hypothesized that the ship emissions support the development of deep-convective cloud systems. The present study investigates the effect of a sevenfold reduction in sulphur content of shipping fuel, implemented following the International Marine Organisation 2020 regulation. A significant decrease in lightning activity is found over shipping lanes in combination with a reduction of both the concentration and the size of the emitted particles, providing further evidence of a strong connection between shipping missions, deep-convective cloud development, and lightning activity. This highlights the need to resolve the still unclear acting mechanisms.

The explosive Hunga Tonga eruption in 2022 had several characteristics that are unique in the recent observational record. Its effects on the atmosphere are of great scientific interest and have included rapidly propagating patterns of Lamb and gravity waves and long-lived anomalies in stratospheric water vapour. This modelling study demonstrates how, through a coupled sequence of chemical, radiative and dynamical mechanisms, the additional water vapour in the tropical upper stratosphere is likely to have had a significant effect on the wintertime circulation of the stratosphere and hence the troposphere in Northern Hemisphere mid- and high latitudes. These results on the fascinating Hunga Tonga event have wider relevance to perturbations of the climate system where the initial impact is stratospheric but important secondary effects are felt elsewhere, including at the surface.

While it has been established for decades that particulate matter, especially the PM2.5 fraction, can be quantitatively linked to a variety of negative health outcomes from both long- and short-term exposure, our ability to conclusively link this to specific particle components or types has proved stubbornly elusive. If particular sources or chemical components were found to be the driving factors, these could lead to more effective interventions and regulations. Because of recent advances in our observational capabilities and fundamental understanding of particle composition and toxicity, this opinion piece argues that we are at a pivotal moment in this ongoing area of study, and summarises some recent advances in this area.

Among the most important atmospheric processes to humans is precipitation, which may take the liquid phase (rainfall) or ice phase (snowfall) at the Earth's surface. However, the great majority of precipitation reaching the Earth's surface passes through an ice phase before melting, and thus descends some distance through the atmosphere at a rate that is commonly understood to depend on ice particle shape. While it is colloquially said that no two snowflakes are exactly alike, their shapes do fall into a range of categories. In this work, a common diversity of ice crystal shapes are reproduced via 3D printing and their shapes are found to lead to a range of stable and unstable patterns of motion, such as zigzagging or spiraling. These motions are systematically investigated and characterized. Such advances in understanding the variability of ice fall speeds bear on a wide range of disciplines including climate forecasting and a variety of approaches to remote sensing of atmospheric conditions. [Videos are recommended accompaniment.]

This paper is written by experts in the field and addresses new tropospheric chemical mechanism developments. It shows how new analytical methods, instrumentation and cheminformatics methods have led to the identification of key processes and knowledge gaps in our understanding of chemical mechanisms, both in the gas phase and condensed phases. The opinion paper presents a perspective on these developments in the present and future, and outlines new directions. This opinion will be a very valuable contribution for the community and I am convinced it will be frequently read and cited.

Ice Nucleating Particles (INP) remain one of the biggest sources of uncertainty when mechanistically predicting the properties of clouds and precipitation in meteorological and earth system models. This paper presents the results from some comprehensive in situ and remote sensing measurements of these aerosols at a mountaintop site in the Eastern Mediterranean, performing a highly detailed study of their sources and properties, including those of dust and bioaerosol. The results are then used to generate new parameterisations that can be applied in large-scale models, thus providing an observational basis for improving future predictions.

Measurement datasets of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) are vital for our understanding of aerosol-cloud interaction and reliable climate modelling. This study analyses and compares the only two global CCN datasets derived from satellite and reanalysis data. These key datasets are found to disagree over pristine oceans in terms of their climatology as well as seasonal and annual variations. Given the importance of CCN as a fundamental property in climate model simulations, further research is needed to reconcile these differences and to produce an observation-based dataset that can be confidently used to evaluate our understanding.

Agriculture and food systems significantly affect atmospheric composition, air quality and ecosystems and their relative influence is growing due to the regulations of traditional industrial emissions and due to increasing food demand and changes in dietary choices. This opinion piece discusses not just the direct emissions of reactive nitrogen compounds, but also related pre- and post-stages, including fertilizer production, food processing and transport. The authors give valuable recommendations for future societally and environmentally responsible regulations of the food systems to meet global sustainability goals.

Aerosols moderate climate change by modifying cloud properties to make them more reflective to sunlight, but the magnitude of the effect remains very uncertain, with important implications for future climate change. This study combines satellite observations and reanalysis data to calculate a much weaker radiative forcing due to aerosol-cloud interactions than previous studies. The implication is that aerosols may play a smaller role in climate change than has been widely supposed.

Volcanic aerosol can persist in the stratosphere for many months and have a significant cooling effect on the troposphere. The effects of the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 are an important recent example. The time that aerosol remains in the stratosphere is determined by the combined effects of transport and sedimentation. This paper sets out a simple conceptual framework for capturing these effects and combines it with observations and modelling to give robust estimates of key timescales. This framework will be valuable in studies of future eruptions and in studies of artificial stratospheric aerosol injection as a possible approach to solar radiation modification.

Ship tracks are the phenomenon of lines of enhanced cloud reflectivity visible from space that are caused by the particulate emissions of shipping vessels. The emissions cause cloud droplets to become smaller, with a more contentious possibility that they increase cloud water by shutting down precipitation, both effects having a cooling effect on the local climate. This study applies a clever new methodology to show that past studies that measured an increase of cloud water were likely erroneous due to a sampling artifact: they assumed ship tracks were randomly oriented where in fact ship tracks align with the winds. This orientation bias was cleverly ascertained by "sailing" ships through the winds and clouds of a different year than the one in which the ship tracks were measured. A climate cooling effect from increased cloud water was still obtained, but one much smaller than described previously. The result implies that ships may not be as effective a geoengineering tool as has previously been assumed.

Noctilucent clouds form in the extremely cold temperatures in the high-latitude summer mesosphere (altitudes of 75-85km). Their formation requires the right combination of water vapour concentrations and temperatures. It has been speculated for example, that increasing frequency of occurrence of such clouds might result from increases in methane concentrations, with the methane being converted into water vapour in the upper stratosphere and mesosphere. This paper reports observations of noctilucent clouds, made using an automated lidar system in southern Argentina, at unexpectedly low latitudes compared to previous Southern Hemisphere observations. Possible explanations, including systematic moistening of the mesosphere by space traffic, are discussed.

There has been much emphasis on the increased predictability of the extratropical tropospheric circulation after stratospheric sudden warmings and the potential value of this to weather forecasting. But it remains the case that the sudden warmings themselves, which are significantly (but not exclusively) driven by variabiliity in the troposphere, have limited predictability. This paper uses ensemble forecasts to identify tropospheric circulation features that, if poorly predicted in the period prior to a sudden warming, lead to a poor prediction of the warming itself and hence provides a potentially useful focus for future improvements to forecast models.