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| IAMAS Early Career Scientist Webinar Series #2 August 25th 2021 |
| Quantifying the Human Impact on Climate by Doing “Experiments” on Clouds |
 Dr. Edward Gryspeerdt Royal Society University Research Fellow Department of Physics Imperial College London |
| Wednesday August 25th at 15:00-16:00 UTC All attendees must register through the following link:https://univ-lille-fr.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_47jo-glETPuz0p-v0AHq1g |
| Abstract Almost all cloud droplets and many ice crystals form on small (nanometre to micron sized) particles known as aerosols. Increases in aerosols from human activity have increased the concentration of droplets in clouds since the industrial revolution, making clouds more reflective and cooling the climate offsetting a significant fraction of the warming from greenhouse gases. Unfortunately, clouds are highly variable which makes the impact of aerosols difficult to isolate. This means that the impact of aerosols on clouds remains one the most uncertain anthropogenic forcing of the climate system. Here we provide a way around this problem, by using isolated sources of aerosol as natural experiments into cloud behaviour. By matching satellite observations of clouds to new datasets on ship positions and emissions, we can characterise the aerosol-cloud system in hundreds of thousands of cases. This allows us to measure not only which clouds are sensitive to aerosols, but how sensitive they are and how quickly they respond to changes in their environment. As well as providing new insights into cloud processes useful for constraining models, it also demonstrates a way to monitor shipping pollution in the open ocean. |
| Dr. Edward Gryspeerdt is a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London. He previously worked at the Universities of Leipzig and and Oxford, looking at aerosol-cloud interactions and cloud physics in observations and models. |
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