Shipping emissions aid cloud formation for cooling effect

Led by the University of Washington, the research looked at satellite data over a shipping lane in the south Atlantic from 2003 to 2015. It found that particles from shipping emissions caused clouds to ‘seed’ around these shipping routes more readily, blocking an additional 2W of solar energy, on average, from reaching each square metre of ocean surface near the lanes.

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The UW team extrapolated that globally, industrial pollution blocks 1W of solar energy per square metre of the Earth’s surface, masking almost a third of the present-day warming from greenhouse gases.  The work is published in AGU Advances.

“In climate models, if you simulate the world with sulphur emissions from shipping, and you simulate the world without these emissions, there is a sizable cooling effect from changes in the model clouds due to shipping,” said first author Michael Diamond, a UW doctoral student in atmospheric sciences. “But because there’s so much natural variability it’s been hard to see this effect in observations of the real world.”