Innovation Anthology #597:
In her iconic song “Both Sides Now”, Joni Mitchell sings
Learning more about clouds and their relationship to climate change is what drives the research of Dr. Phillip Austin.
His latest work at the University of British Columbia has focused on shallow clouds and cloud feedback.
DR. PHILLIP AUSTIN: Shallow clouds are clouds that only go up to about three kilometers in the atmosphere. And sometimes they rain, often they don’t. But what they do always is pump water vapour and energy off of the surface where sunlight is absorbed and the ocean is evaporating. And so these shallow clouds actually are like a valve in they control the moisture that’s available to deeper clouds in the tropics. So they’ve got a supporting role, but its actually quite a crucial supporting role, because their mixing activity actually is the feeder that supplies the energy to the huge tropical storms.
Dr. Austin says it’s difficult to represent shallow clouds in current climate models. So he has resorted to tracking individual clouds to determine exactly what they do.
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I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
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Program Date: 2014-02-27