Climate Synthesis Essay

Words: 464
Pages: 2

When sunlight hits the earth, the sunlight is absorbed or reflected which affects the earth’s energy budget. The earth will be warmer if sunlight is absorbed and cooler if sunlight is reflected. Aerosols affected the Earth’s energy budget as well but there was uncertainty how. Interactions among aerosols, clouds, radiation and circulation need to be predicted better and need to be observed in climate models. Particles such as water droplets and ice crystals have influenced cloud formation and other cloud radiative properties by accumulating on small aerosol particles.
Satellite remote sensing gave more improved details on clouds and aerosols, however it had trouble seeing the vertical extent of clouds. In April 2006, the CALIPSO was developed
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It means that the mean surface temperature changes due to unit forcing. Climate sensitivity depended on what type of feedback was given. The opinion either amplified or diminished the response in hand with cloud forcings. Cloud parameterizations also led to different results in climate change. There were uncertainties in some of the feedbacks and they had to be lessened. This was done by global cloud data sets which were able to find more uncertainties of properties of clouds and their vertical structure. Now CALIPSO and Cloudsat are able to give more information on these details. They were also able to find characteristics in upper and lower level clouds. First CALIPSO observations are used with passive sensors to form cloud properties relating to climatology. The signals of CALIPSO are sensative to clouds. With passive sensors, the CALIPSO was able to look into multilayer clouds and find its properties. When a cirrus cloud was lying in other cloud layers, lidar was penetrated. This led to more observations of lower level clouds. Second, CALIPSO was able to find characteristics of upper cirrus clouds above lower layers. An example of an upper level cloud was a cirrus cloud which has an effect on radiative forcing. Cirrus clouds were made up of ice crystals which behaved differently on radiative effects than water droplets. The CALIPSO now was able to use lidar and infrared measurements to see how earth’s energy budget