Most people associate clouds with precipitation like rain or snow, but clouds influence many atmospheric processes.
Most people associate clouds with precipitation like rain or snow, but clouds influence many atmospheric processes. Cloud formation is affected by turbulence, which creates fluctuations of wind speed, wind direction, temperature, humidity and the concentration of water droplets in the air. However, those interactions are currently difficult to study.
Scott Salesky, an assistant professor of meteorology in the College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, is leading research that will improve the way clouds are represented in weather and climate models. The five-year project is funded by a $763,930 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation.
“Clouds have a very important influence on Earth’s climate,” said Salesky. “There’s a lot of focus on the role of greenhouse gases in climate, but clouds are also very important. Clouds can reflect solar radiation, and changes in cloud cover could be as important to climate as increases in greenhouse gases.
“The interesting thing about clouds is that there are a lot of processes that happen at different spatial scales that are all coupled together,” he added. “At very small scales, you have cloud droplets forming and growing, and they can interact with turbulence which can impact large-scale cloud properties, such as clouds’ lifetimes, how much sunlight they reflect (what we call albedo), and also the sizes of the droplets in the clouds, which can determine how quickly it might precipitate.”
Read more at: University of Oklahoma
Scott Salesky with students Brian Green and Leia Otterstatter (Photo Credit: University of Oklahoma)
