NOAA and partner research on clouds and air-sea interactions will help improve a new generation of models that predict our weather and climate, according to a new summary article that is part of a special issue of the open access journal Earth System Science Data.
Air & Sea Chronicles is NOAA's blog series documenting the ATOMIC mission in Barbados. This is the third post from Janet Intrieri, a research scientist from NOAA's Earth System Research Lab Physical Sciences Division, who gives us a recap of a week releasing weather balloons on the NOAA Ship Ronald H. Brown.
Picture a calm, sunny day at a tropical beach. You look out at the ocean and in the distance a flotilla of small white clouds sails close to the waves. It’s ideal weather and typical of many days in the tropical Atlantic. However, scientists don’t fully understand how these ubiquitous clouds (a type of “shallow convective cloud”) form and impact the ocean, and it represents one of the largest uncertainties in predicting climate change.