Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Scientists are peering into the clouds near the top of the world, trying to solve a mystery and learn something new about global warming. The mystery is the droplets of water in the cluds. With the North Pole just 685 miles away, they should be frozen, yet more of them are liquid than anyone expected. So the scientists working out of a converted blue cargo container are trying to determine whether the clouds are one of the causes — or effects — of Earth’s warming atmosphere.
“Much to our surprise, we found that Arctic clouds have got lots of super-cooled liquid water in them. Liquid water has even been detected in clouds at temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius,” said Taneil Uttal, chief of the Clouds and Arctic Research Group at the Earth Systems Research Laboratory of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“If a cloud is composed of liquid water droplets in the Arctic, instead of ice crystals, then that changes how they will interact with the earth’s surface and the atmosphere to reflect, absorb and transmit radiation,” said Ms Uttal. “It’s a new science, driven by the fact that everybody doing climate predictions says that clouds are perhaps the single greatest unknown factor in understanding global warming.”
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