Thunderstorms clumping together: How understanding water vapor helps scientists predict future climate change
October 1, 2023 - Dani Rae Wascher
A team of international scientists from the USA, France, Germany, and Ethiopia recently published cutting-edge climate research on how thunderstorms can “clump” together and how that influences the Earth’s climate. This led to the discovery that this clumping, or aggregation, of clouds can affect the Earth’s climate in multiple ways that were not previously understood. The research titled, “The Influence of Convective Aggregation on the Stable Isotopic Composition of Water Vapor” was recently published in the prestigious journal AGU Advances.
“It's a new group of datasets, and this was the first time we were able to bring all these different techniques to bear on the interesting problem of how clouds clump together and how that clumping can affect climate,” said University of New Mexico's Department Earth & Planetary Sciences Professor Joseph Galewsky. This research was conducted while Galewsky was on sabbatical in France at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD) in Paris, and was supported by the National Science Foundation, the LABEX-IPSL Visitor Program at LMD, and through a Fulbright Research Grant, which provides faculty and students with international research opportunities.
The idea that thunderstorms can aggregate has been known for decades, but its impacts on water vapor and the use of stable isotopes in water vapor to track these processes are quite new. There is evidence that the clumping of clouds has a surprisingly large impact on climate.
In this research, the team of international scientists used remote sensing data to investigate how the organization of clouds affects the chemistry of water vapor in the atmosphere. These clouds can range from individual cells to larger systems like tropical cyclones. The study focused on the global tropics from 2015 to 2020.
One of the key discoveries of the research was that cloud organization impacts the distribution of water vapor in the atmosphere. They found that when clouds are not organized (unaggregated), the atmosphere tends to have more moisture but that the water vapor is relatively depleted in deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen. This suggests that evaporation from rain contributes to this pattern.
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