Sunlight and Clouds
A cloud is a visible mass of water droplets or frozen ice crystals suspended in the Earth's atmosphere above the surface of the Earth or other planetary body. On a cloudy day the surface under the clouds appears darker and cooler. Atmospheric scientists trying to pin down how clouds curb the amount of sunlight available to warm the earth have found that it depends on the wavelength of sunlight being measured. This unexpected result will help researchers improve how they portray clouds in climate models. Additionally, the researchers found that sunlight scattered by clouds — the reason why beach goers can get sunburned on overcast days — is an important component of cloud contributions to the earth's energy balance. Capturing such contributions will increase the accuracy of climate models, the team from the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory reported in Geophysical Research Letters earlier this month.
The color of a cloud tells much about what is going on inside the cloud. Dense deep tropospheric clouds exhibit a high reflectance throughout the visible spectrum. Tiny particles of water are densely packed and sunlight cannot penetrate far into the cloud before it is reflected out, giving a cloud its characteristic white color. Cloud droplets tend to scatter light efficiently, so that the intensity of the solar radiation decreases with depth. As a result, the cloud base can vary from a very light to a very dark gray depending on the cloud's thickness and how much light is being reflected or transmitted back to the observer.
The role of clouds in regulating weather and climate remains a leading source of uncertainty in projections of global warming. This uncertainty arises because of the delicate balance of processes related to clouds, spanning scales from millimeters to planetary. The complexity and diversity of clouds, as outlined above, adds to the problem. On the one hand, white colored cloud tops promote cooling of the Earth's surface by reflecting shortwave radiation from the Sun. However radiation that makes it to the ground is reflected back in long wavelengths that are easily absorbed by water in the clouds resulting in a net warming at surface level.
Overall, most clouds have a net cooling effect, but atmospheric scientists need to accurately measure when they cool and warm to produce better climate models that incorporate clouds faithfully.
Fair-weather clouds are big puffy white objects that bounce a lot of light around. They can make the sky around them look brighter when they're there, but they float about and reform constantly. Cloud droplets and aerosol particles in the sky — tiny bits of dirt and water in the air that cause haziness — scatter light in three dimensions, even into cloud shadows.
To determine the net cloud effect, researchers need two numbers. First they need to measure the total amount of sunlight in a cloudy sky. Then they need to determine how bright that sky would be without the clouds, imagining that same sky to be blue and cloudless, when aerosols are in charge of a sky's brightness. The difference between those numbers is the net cloud effect.
Researchers have traditionally estimated the net cloud effect by measuring a broad spectrum of sunlight that makes it to the earth's surface, from ultraviolet to infrared. Clouds are white because water droplets within them scatter light of all colors almost equally in the visible spectrum, the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that includes the colors of the rainbow.
On the other hand, aerosols — both within clouds and in the open sky — bounce different-colored light unequally. Broadband measurements that fail to distinguish color differences might be covering up important details.
Instead of taking one broadband measurement that covers everything from ultraviolet to infrared, the new research wanted to determine how individual wavelengths contribute to the net cloud effect. To do so, the team used an instrument that can measure brightness at four different wavelengths of color — violet, green, orange, red — and two of infrared.
This instrument, a spectral radiometer, allowed the team to calculate what the brightness would be if the day sported a cloudless, blue sky. The spectral measurements taken by the radiometer can be converted into the amount and properties of aerosols. Then aerosol properties can be used to calculate clear blue sky brightness.
Comparing measured values for cloudy sky to the calculated values for clear sky, the researchers found that, on average, puffy fair-weather clouds cool down the earth's surface by several percent on a summer day. Although clouds cool overall, two components that the researchers looked at — from direct and scattered sunlight — had opposite effects.
The direct component accounts for the shade provided by clouds and cools the earth. The second component accounts for the sunlight scattered between and under clouds, which makes the sky brighter, warming the earth.
In the Oklahoma summer, the scattered-light effect measured by the researchers could be quite large. For example, if a cloud passed over the instrument, the measured cloudy sky brightness exceeded calculated clear sky value by up to 30 percent. Kassianov, one of the authors, attributes the large difference to scattered sunlight being "caught on tape" by the radiometer.
The team also found that the effect changed depending on the measured visible-spectrum wavelength, and whether the light was direct or scattered.
With direct light, the cooling caused by clouds was weakest on the violet end of the spectrum and strongest at infrared. With scattered light, warming caused by clouds was also weakest at violet and the strongest at infrared. Overall, the least cooling and warming occurred at violet, and the most cooling and warming occurred at infrared.
These results suggest that aerosols — which not only cause haziness but contribute to cloud formation as well — are responsible for the wavelength differences, something researchers need to be aware of as they study clouds in the sky.
For further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud