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Clouds are fundamental to Earth's climate system, shaping the global energy balance through their reflective (cooling) and heat-trapping (warming) effects. The processes that govern cloud behavior span scales, from microscopic droplet formation to the evolution of weather systems hundreds of kilometers across, making clouds one of the least constrained and most influential uncertainties in predicting weather and climate. As a result, clouds continue to confound our understanding of global environmental change and limit robust projections of Earth's future.
In this seminar, I will explore the role of clouds in shaping Earth's radiation budget across scales, from the global to the regional and down to the cloud level. I will begin with the global picture, showing how the distribution of clouds shapes the shortwave radiation budget at the top of the atmosphere and helps sustain a robust yet still mysterious hemispheric symmetry in planetary albedo. I will then turn to a real-world inadvertent “natural” experiment, the 2020 International Maritime Organization sulfur fuel regulation (IMO2020), to illustrate how an abrupt perturbation to aerosol emissions left a large yet hard-to-detect imprint on Earth's radiation budget, and what this implies for the detectability of proposed Marine Cloud Brightening. Finally, I shift the focus to cloud-scale process understanding of aerosol-cloud interactions using satellite observations and process modeling, with an emphasis on how co-varying meteorological conditions modulate the susceptibility of global marine low clouds to aerosol perturbations.
Dr. Jianhao Zhang is a research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder, working in the Clouds, Aerosol & Climate group led by Graham Feingold at NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory (CSL). Jianhao's research focuses on understanding boundary-layer clouds, the atmospheric and microphysical processes governing their behavior, and their role in shaping the Earth's radiation budget, with implications for Climate Intervention. Before joining CIRES and NOAA CSL, Jianhao received his Ph.D. in Meteorology & Physical Oceanography from the University of Miami (2020), and his B.S. in Meteorology from Florida State University (2014).
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ALL Seminar attendees agree not to cite, quote, copy, or distribute material presented without the explicit written consent of the seminar presenter. Any opinions expressed in this seminar are those of the speaker alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of NOAA or CSL.
