Clouds modulate the flows of energy through the climate system, shaping everything from precipitation to circulations at all scales. We are primarily interested in shallow clouds -- those in which ice doesn't form -- because they have a profound impact on climate.
We participated in the ATOMIC and EUREC4A field campaigns held in early 2020 near the island of Barbados in the Atlantic Ocean to study scattered shallow clouds.
Xuanyu Chen's postdoctoral work (co-supervised with Juliana Dias and Brandon Holding at NOAA's Physical Sciences Lab) examined how clouds responds to small-scale increases in sea surface temperature, which are much more frequent than was appreciated.
- Chen, X. et al., 2025. Impacts of Weak Sea Surface Temperature Warm Anomalies on Trade Wind Cloudiness in Large Eddy Simulations. J. Adv. Modeling Earth Syst., 17, e2024MS004778. doi:10.1029/2024MS004778.
- Chen, X. et al., 2023: Ubiquitous sea surface temperature warm anomalies increase spatial heterogeneity of trade-wind cloudiness on daily timescales. J. Atmos. Sci., 80, 2969-2987, doi:10.1175/JAS-D-23-0075.1
After participating in EUREC4A Ben Fildier (working primarily with Caroline Muller) discovered why radiative cooling peaks so dramatically at the top of the cloud layer even when clouds are rare:
- Fildier, B., C. Muller, R. Pincus, and S. Fueglistaler, 2023: How moisture shapes low-level radiative cooling in subsidence regimes. AGU Advances, 4, e2023AV000880, doi:10.1029/2023AV000880 (with collaborators at CNRS, France;l ISTA, Austria; and Princeton)
And sometimes it's not the clouds. The skies over the southern oceans have become increasingly bright over the last decades; this appears to be caused by faster winds over those oceans lofting more sea salt aerosol into the atmosphere. Notably, changes are so small and the background variability is so large that the trends are detectable only with dense sampling.
- Singer, C. E., & Pincus, R., 2026. Southern Ocean clear-sky brightening from sea spray aerosol increase drives departure from hemispheric albedo symmetry. Geophys. Res. Lett., 53, e2025GL119637. doi:10.1029/2025GL119637
