Anna Tippett

Anna is a PhD student researching the effects of aerosols on clouds. Aerosol-cloud interactions remain one of the significant uncertainties in our understanding of our climate, and Anna applies both observational and modelling techniques to investigate the impact of aerosols, as well as potential future applications in the context of Climate Intervention strategies. She is part of the Grantham Institute Science and Solutions for a Changing Planet DTP, and works with partners at the UK Met Office.
Observing the impact of shipping on clouds 
Ships can modify the properties of the clouds above them through the injection of sulphate aerosols, leaving distinct bright cloud formations known as ’ship tracks’. Using satellites, we can observe both the magnitude and time scales of the physical processes occurring when these aerosols and clouds interact, and quantify the aerosol impact on clouds. This work reveals a bias in previous ship track work, and addresses subtleties in the techniques used when observing clouds with satellites. Correcting for this bias, we investigate how clouds respond differently to aerosols in different conditions, such as in precipitating or polluted clouds.

Oliver Driver

Ollie is a PhD student interested in applying Earth Observation and Atmospheric Physics to understand the uncertainties restricting climate action in aviation—particularly action to mitigate the formation of clouds from aircraft exhaust, which has a warming effect comparable to the sector’s CO2 emissions. He is part of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Aerosol Science and works between the Cloud Physics Group (Edward Gryspeerdt) and the Civil and Environmental Engineering Transport and Environment Laboratory (Marc Stettler).

 

Can contrails be detected using satellites?

Contrails (line shaped ice clouds formed from aircraft exhaust) are optically thin, and spatially narrow compared to the resolving ability of typical satellite imagers. This is particularly true of geostationary imagers which could provide valuable time-resolved observations of contrails for monitoring and model validation. In this work, synthetic satellite data is produced to determine what properties make a contrail detectable in an ideal case. This is combined with a modelled inventory of contrails to estimate that fewer than half of the contrails that form can be detected—but the most strongly forcing ones can. This supports the use of these methods as part of a validation strategy, but highlights challenges, such as delayed observation as an obstacle to attributions of detections to generating aircraft.

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