Project description
Tracking how air pollution shapes clouds
Air pollution does more than affect the air we breathe. Tiny particles released by ships, factories and other human activities can also influence clouds, reflecting sunlight and cooling the planet. Scientists suspect this cooling effect may have masked part of the warming caused by greenhouse gases, but its true strength remains uncertain. The ERC-funded CloudTracker project aims to use satellite observations to compare clouds forming in polluted air with nearby clouds in cleaner conditions. Pollution from ships and industrial sites creates visible ‘cloud tracks’ that act as natural experiments. By analysing millions of these disturbances, the project will assess how aerosols change cloud thickness and coverage. The findings will help predict future warming.
Objective
Anthropogenic climate change is a tug-of-war with fossil fuels playing both sides of the field. Fossil fuel use emits both climate-warming greenhouse gases and climate-cooling aerosols. And aerosol impacts on clouds might have thus far masked a large fraction of greenhouse gas warming. If the aerosol cooling is strong, it implies 1) that the Earth’s climate is more sensitive to anthropogenic greenhouse gases than currently thought, and 2) reduced aerosol pollution has brought forward global warming.
This project’s overarching hypothesis is that aerosol cooling is strong. I tackle this main hypothesis via the following specific hypotheses:
- Thicker Clouds: Aerosols increase cloud thickness, challenging the current scientific understanding.
- More Clouds: Cloud coverage and thickness consistently increase in response to aerosols due to suppressed precipitation.
- Few Glaciated Clouds: The warming effect of anthropogenic aerosols glaciating supercooled clouds is weak compared to the cooling effects by thicker and more extensive clouds.
To quantify poorly understood aerosol impacts on clouds, I will overlay remote sensing observations of clouds with anthropogenic air pollution hot spots in novel ways. Aerosols emitted by ships and industrial facilities induce polluted cloud tracks that serve as opportunistic experiments. By comparing the properties of polluted cloud tracks to those of nearby unpolluted clouds, I will infer the causal impact of aerosols on clouds. As the heart of the project, I will create an observatory to identify more than twelve million weak and strong cloud perturbations induced by aerosols from air pollution hot spots. A unique combination of weak and strong aerosol perturbations on clouds will allow me to quantify the least understood aerosol impacts on clouds and achieve unprecedented representativeness of cloud responses. I will scale cloud responses to aerosols to the global level to assess the plausibility of strong aerosol cooling.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- engineering and technology environmental engineering energy and fuels fossil energy natural gas
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences environmental sciences pollution
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
51005 TARTU
Estonia
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