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Clouds’ cooling effect could vanish in a warmer world

High concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide can result in the dispersal of cloud banks that reflect roughly 30% of the sunlight that hits them.
  1. Emiliano Rodríguez Mega
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Low-lying cloud banks off the coast of California, Peru and Namibia are some of the planet’s most effective cooling systems, because they reflect sunlight back into space. But new climate simulations show that increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere could break up these cloud layers and exacerbate future warming.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00685-x

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 26 February 2019: This story has been corrected to reflect the fact that globally, stratocumulus clouds reflect about 4 to 7% of the energy from the sun. They can reflect around 30 to 60% of the sunlight that hits them.

References

  1. Schneider, T. et al. Nature Geosci. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-019-0310-1 (2019).

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