From STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY: Thin clouds at about 5 km altitude are more ubiquitous in the tropics than previously thought and they have a substantial cooling effect on climate. This is shown…
Category: Clouds
New twist on getting climate models to deal with clouds properly
Technique could help climate models sweat the small stuff From BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A team of physicists and mathematicians has come up with a statistical technique…
Expanding tropics pushing high altitude clouds towards poles, NASA study finds
From the NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER and the “30 year trends don’t mean much if we’ve never observed them before” department comes this interesting study. A new NASA analysis of…
Cosmic Disconnections
I read yesterday that someone had supposedly provided evidence in support of Svensmark’s hypothesis that cosmic rays affect the weather. So I went to look it up. The study is called…
Cloudy modeling problems: Today's clouds might not be the same as pre-industrial ones
Study helps narrow down one reason why clouds are hard to model From the DOE/PACIFIC NORTHWEST NATIONAL LABORATORY RICHLAND, Wash. – Airborne particles known as “aerosols” strongly impact the way…
Salty sea spray affects the lifetimes of clouds, researchers find
From COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY and the “climate models still can’t get clouds right” department comes this interesting new study. All over the planet, every day, oceans send plumes of sea spray…
Cooling and Warming, Clouds and Thunderstorms
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Following up on a suggestion made to me by one of my long-time scientific heroes, Dr. Fred Singer, I’ve been looking at the rainfall dataset…
Another unknown climate feedback – plankton blooms create brighter clouds
Marine plankton brighten clouds over Southern Ocean From the NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER New research using NASA satellite data and ocean biology models suggests tiny organisms in vast stretches of…
Silver Ants
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I stumbled across a lovely article about the Saharan silver ant over at phys.org. These ants have special hairs that reflect strongly in the visual…
No surprise here: Jet contrails affect surface temperatures
From Penn State High in the sky where the cirrus ice crystal clouds form, jet contrails draw their crisscross patterns. Now researchers have found that these elevated ice cloud trails…
Albedic Meanderings
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I’ve been considering the nature of the relationship between the albedo and temperature. I have hypothesized elsewhere that variations in tropical cloud albedo are one…
Awesome time-lapse video: Undulatus Asperatus clouds
Unique clouds like you’ve never seen them before! I just thought I’d pass these along due to the unique “catch the wave” appearance of these. Time lapse video follows. This…
Spaceship Lenticular Cloud – Maybe the Coolest Cloud Picture Evah!
Unique Sierra Wave cloud sighted over Reno, NV From my friend Mike Alger at KTVN-TV Reno, who writes: I’ve been on the air doing weather for KTVN-TV for over a…
The physics of clouds
From the University of California – Santa Barbara A UCSB physicist’s experimental results disprove long-held ideas about turbulence In 1941, Russian physicist Andrey Kolmogorov developed a theory of turbulence that…
Link between Cosmic Ray Flux and Global Temperature found
From the paper in PNAS:(h/t to Dr. Leif Svalgaard) Our results suggest weak to moderate coupling between CR and year-to-year changes of GT,” they write. “However, we find that the…
Cloud Feedback
Guest essay by Stan Robertson In a recent post entitled “Changes in Total Solar Irradiance” (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/25/changes-in-total-solar-irradiance/ ), Willis Eschenbach showed a plot of the solar irradiance that impinges at the…
New paper links warming since 1950 to ENSO and cloud cover variations
John McLean writes of a new paper about the pattern in global average temperature anomalies since 1950 and how they are linked to changes in cloud cover and ENSO: Key…
CERN video: Cloudy climate change – How clouds affect Earth's temperature
This is the second video in the TEDed / CERN series created for the TEDxCERN event held on 25 September 2014. Jasper Kirkby explains why scientists need to understand more…
New paper links Arctic sea ice extent to absorption of sunlight by clouds
The Hockeyschtick writes: A new paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres finds Arctic sea ice concentrations at the low of each summer are related to absorption of…
BOMBSHELL: Study shows greenhouse gas induced warming dropped for the past 14 years
Paper finds a decrease of IR radiation from greenhouse gases over past 14 years, contradicts expected increase – cloudiness blamed for difference. A paper published in the Journal of Climate…
You must be logged in to post a comment.