Satellites are seeing just how much pollution is left in the wake of the shipping industry which shows how ships can change cloud behavior.
As ships release exhaust, the aerosols composed of minute particles containing sulfur dioxide and black carbon initiate changes in clouds. These alterations can be tracked along major shipping routes.
These changes ripple out to have significant effects on the Earth’s climate systems according to research led by Dr. Nikos Benas, Dr. Jan Fokke Meirink, and Dr. Rob Roebeling, of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and EUMETSAT’s User Support & Climate Services.
They teamed up to explore how pollution from ships affects clouds using satellite data to see if satellites could spot changes in clouds caused by ship pollution and also check out the effects of new rules set by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in 2020, aimed at cleaning up ship fuel.
The sky-high discoveries spotted some interesting trends.
Data from 2004 to 2023 over a chunk of ocean near Southern Africa, revealed cloud droplets were most abundant near the shipping route and thinned out as you moved away. Plus, closer to the ships, droplets were smaller, but they got bigger further away.
Dr. Roebeling says polluted air has more particles, which helps cloud droplets form. But since there’s only so much water vapor in a cloud, it spreads out over more particles, making smaller droplets.
This study confirms that the regulation substantially reduced the effects of pollution on clouds.
“It is too early to quantify the effects that changes in low-level clouds may have on Earth’s climate,” said Roebeling. “However, we clearly see that clouds above shipping tracks are different than those above nearby unpolluted areas and that clouds in the region we investigated became more transparent since the new IMO regulations were introduced.”