The Life of Clouds
A study that used supercomputers to simulate clouds and their motions raises new concerns about climate change.
A study that used supercomputers to simulate clouds and their motions raises new concerns about climate change. The issue: Marine stratus clouds could face extinction if atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations get too high. And without the clouds’ cooling effect, the planet’s surface temperatures would rise. “I think and hope that technological changes will slow carbon emissions so that we do not actually reach such high CO2 concentrations,” says lead author Tapio Schneider, Theodore Y. Wu Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering, senior research scientist at JPL, and head of the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA), a multi-institutional consortium that is building a new climate model. “But our results show that there are dangerous climate change thresholds that we had been unaware of.”
