Cloud droplet size changes with height, but passive sensors are virtually blind to see it; however, combining passive with active sensors helps profile it in vertically inhomogeneous warm clouds.
clouds
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Improving Estimates of Long-Term Climate Sensitivity
New modeling casts doubt on the suitability of running experiments with fixed sea surface temperatures to understand the effects of cloud aggregation on Earth’s climate.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Improving Retrievals for Partially Cloudy Pixels
Cloud retrievals for partly cloudy pixels might be able to be improved by using high-resolution samples in a visible to near-infrared band, which many satellite sensors offer.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Fog Catching for Thirsty Locales
Many arid and semi-arid regions experience very little rainfall, but quite a bit of fog, which might be a viable source of drinking water.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
What Makes a Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flash in Thunderclouds?
Two lightning flashes were observed in the same location: One produced a bright gamma-ray flash with about 1000 counts per millisecond, but the other did not.
Posted inEditors' Vox
Atmospheric Aerosol in the Changing Arctic
Warming and sea ice loss in the Arctic are affecting the complex interactions between the atmosphere, ocean, land, and ice-covered areas, including the formation and transport of aerosol.
Posted inNews
Could Life Be Floating in Venus’s Clouds?
If present, microbes could explain evolving patterns in the planet’s atmosphere when observed in ultraviolet light.
Posted inEditors' Vox
How Many Water Droplets Are in a Cloud?
The number of droplets in clouds affects how much of the Sun’s warming energy is reflected back to space. But how reliable are our attempts to count them?
Posted inNews
New Juno Data Reveal Four Key Secrets of Jupiter
Deep clouds, polar storms, lopsided gravity, and a uniformly rotating interior demonstrate that the gas giant plays by different rules than Earth.
Posted inScience Updates
Around the World in 84 Days
In the Stratéole 2 program, set to launch in November 2018, instruments will ride balloons into the stratosphere and circle the world, observing properties of the air and winds in fine detail.