You are currently viewing the summary.
View Full TextLog in to view the full text
AAAS login provides access to Science for AAAS members, and access to other journals in the Science family to users who have purchased individual subscriptions.
More options
Download and print this article for your personal scholarly, research, and educational use.
Buy a single issue of Science for just $15 USD.
Summary
Aerosols are tiny particles suspended in the atmosphere that originate from sources such as agricultural waste, forest fires, sea spray (see the photo), desert dust, and industrial pollution. They alter the energy balance of Earth's climate system through direct reflection and absorption of solar radiation as well as through modulating cloud properties by serving as nuclei for cloud particles. As a result of such aerosol-cloud interactions (1), cloud particle size tends to fall with increasing aerosol number concentration and rain formation is suppressed. However, it has been difficult to determine the overall cloud response to these interactions and the resulting climate effect. On page 599 of this issue, Rosenfeld et al. (2) report that the cloud response to the interaction is much larger than previously estimated (see the figure).
This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.
