Some clouds help cool the Earth, but other clouds help keep Earth warm – in part depending on how high up they are in our atmosphere. That’s according to Steven Platnick, a satellite researcher with NASA, who spoke with EarthSky in late 2010. Platnick studies clouds and how they connect with Earth’s climate. He said that low, fluffy clouds keep us cooler. He told EarthSky:
You can appreciate that if you go out on a hot and sunny day, and a cloud passes by overhead, it’s a great relief from the heat. And the reason of course is because the cloud is reflecting sunlight.
But it’s a different story for clouds that are high up in the atmosphere, said Platnick. Those high, wispy clouds actually keep Earth warm, like a blanket, by preventing heat from escaping into space.
Dr. Platnick uses NASA’s Aqua satellite to determine the height of clouds, and other properties of clouds as well – like what’s inside a cloud, how much water they have, whether the cloud is primarily liquid or ice. The satellite also tracks the amount of cloud cover all over the world. He said:
The most important thing to trying to understand their effect on global climate is we need to know how they’re globally distributed and how they vary over the course of a year. And you need satellites to really obtain the statistics over those scales. It’s really impossible for most of those quantities to get the same statistics from ground-based or aircraft observations.
Dr. Platnick explained to EarthSky what scientists mean when they talk about climate.
When scientists talk about climate, what we’re talking about is the statistics of weather. And normally we’re talking about that on multi-decadal time scales, and longer, even centuries and millennium. An example might be the average surface temperatures, something that most people can relate to. Or also, the minimum and maximum surface temperatures.
There ares other examples – precipitation, the amount of rainfall during the month, or snowfall, or snow pack. But when we talk about recent climate change, and the causes of recent climate change, and that’s over the last several decades including the last several centuries since the start of the industrial revolution, then we start to study the effect of human activities, and how humans can directly modify climate.
Dr. Platnick said that there are several ways that humans can directly impact climate. The best understood of these, he said, and what’s likely the most important in the long run, is the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
And that includes not just carbon dioxide, but methane, ozone, there’s other gases as well. And these greenhouse gases perturb the radiation balance of climate. And what they do is move the climate system to a warmer state. And it does that because of the way that gases reduce the emissions of infrared radiation to space by the Earth and its atmosphere. And this so-called greenhouse gas forcing on the climate system is well-understood.
He said that what’s less well-understood is how the climate responds to this forcing.
Steven Platnick: And that is the focus of much climate modeling research today. It’s certainly the motivation behind many of NASA’s satellite observations and the modeling studies that we do, and that’s in fact what a large part of my own work involves.
Steven Platnick told EarthSky what he thought was the most important thing people should know about Earth’s clouds and climate.
Earth is a dynamic system of components. On the largest scales you have the atmosphere, the land, the ocean, snow and ice on the ground. These systems connect with each other in different ways, through the exchange of water, and energy, and chemistry, such as the exchange of carbon. We need to be able to better understand the consequences of these connections.
Clouds are the prime example of this interconnection, because they play a key role in these systems, especially in the water and energy connections. NASA satellites and instruments, along with our international partners are helping us to get better observations we need to understand these cloud physical processes and to enable cloud model improvements as well.
Our thanks today to NASA’s Aqua Mission, improving our knowledge of our home planet through satellite observations.
As I understand it, evaporation / convection thermal mechanisms are one of the largest energy transporters between the oceans / land surface and upper atmosphere. In their formation high altitude clouds give off thermal radiation to space. Basically, when H20 evaporate leaves the surface, it rises until it attains sufficient altitude to change state to a liquid or ice, where it gives off roughly 609 calories per gram in the conversion to liquid and an additional 80 cal/gm during conversion to ice crystals. The energy is radiated at an altitude where there is much less green house gas acting as a barrier to radiation towards space. So while high altitude clouds may act as a blanket once formed, in their formation they have a somewhat opposite effect. So to understand the cloud effect on the overall radiation budget, we must also understand and quantify the evaporation / convection thermal processes that form them as well.
There remains much with respect to clouds we just don’t understand well and thus poorly represent in the GCM models. I hope Dr. Platnick’s research expands our understanding of the effects of clouds on our climate.
I hope my research expands our understanding of the effects of clouds on our climate. Design captures GHGs from the atmosphere and sequesters themA molecule that attracts + or – ions and can be distributed as a fog that has the ability to catch GHGs like a spider web. Once the gasses are caught, they are contained in h20 vapor and act as nuclei for ice to form and accumulate as a cloud to transport to the dumps for storage and use by life forms. The best method of separating the air’s mixed content of gasses is the liquefaction of the air itself; synthesis of GHG’s molecules forms globules in a colloidal state within the h2o molecule in an air born colloid aerosol suspension.[cloud Nuclei seeding,] following the parabolic path downward to their fellow h2o molecules.
Earth’s ecosystems and natural environments are in need of some help.if We do not want to wait for things to change naturally, but change by anthropogenic design. Methods; form a foggy aerosol cloud net, ["web of synthesis molecule"] [1] that will TRAP greenhouse gasses. In the upper part of the troposphere forming large man-made clouds (contrails) Alabaster clouds are the best reflectors of light and provide shade which can cause changes in temperature. seeding the air with large hygroscopic nuclei precipitation trapping greenhouse gasses. Giant molecules for the specific purpose of SEEDING (nuclei) causing the formation of clouds to produce snow and rain (weather modification) in the troposphere. Alabaster clouds[ dump-sters]
that transport the captured GHGs to the dumps as rain, hail , sleet and alabaster snow for storage and life forms[ the nutrients] that depend on it to prosper .[ The microorganisms are such as the ones found in mineral oils: ] Covering dirty snow and ice with “a free two faced nuclei”that will make the dumps able to re-freeze [at 0' not -42'] and stop leaking, insuring longevity and viability to store our waste. We can store as much GHG ‘s and H2o as we want if we need more dry land. plase help! charlie
It also depends on the terrain the clouds are passing over. Bright clouds over a dark ocean or dark terrain have a relatively different effect from clouds passing over fields of snow.
awesome..i did not know that the clouds could warm the earth… its kinda kewl!!! lol
science ROX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In the name of scientific integrity will someone with appropriate expertise, please, pray tell us, what scientists and professional researchers with appropriate expertise have known, based upon the best availabile scientific evidence, about the population dynamics of the human species? During my lifetime, what did so-called experts know and when did you know it? Why the worldwide conspiracy of silence concerning human overpopulation issues in the past 66 years?
The family of humanity as well as much of life as we know it are now here inhabitants of a finite planet with a frangible environment that is failing fast. What really matters is being inadvertently ruined on our watch by the human population, but is not being openly discussed. My ‘blood boils’ in the truth that we have possessed knowledge of so much about ourselves as human beings with feet of clay and acknowledged so little about what has been known for so long about our distinctly human creatureliness, based upon extensive empirical research and unchallenged scientific evidence. Elective mutism and silent consent in the face of the reckless degradation, relentless dissipation and willful sell-off of what everyone knows to be sacred looks to me like the worst of all precipitants of the colossal ecological wreckage that appears in the offing.
Inside and outside the community of top rank scientists, as well as among first class professionals in demography and economics who claim appropriate expertise in issues concerning human overpopulation, one issue is not being discussed by anyone. A worldwide conspiracy of silence continues to prevail about the population dynamics of the human species. The last of the last taboos is the open discussion of extant scientific research of human population dynamics. The implications of this astounding denial of what could somehow be real are potentially profound for the future of life on Earth, I suppose.
Within the human community a tiny minority of self-proclaimed masters of the universe hold the ‘destiny’ of all in their hands. This elite group is operating behind the scenes these days and “growing” the global economy to such a colossal scale that it could soon become patently unsustainable on a planet with the size, composition and ecology of Earth because our planetary home is not, definitely not “too big to fail.”
Hurry up, please, it is time for speaking out loudly, clearly and often before it is too late for human action to matter. Like it or not, ready or not, intellectually honest and morally courageous scientists have unassumed responsibilities to science…. and unfulfilled duties to humanity that must be performed.
There is a critical shortage of ifonramtive articles like this.
i want more information along the infrared waves.i kindly request to you.
thank you