How Do Active Volcanoes Change Clouds?

Narration: Joy Ng

Transcript:

Volcanoes. You might think of big, loud eruptions. Glowing lava and dark volcanic ash entering the sky.

But when volcanoes aren’t erupting they can leak reactive gases into the atmosphere that form tiny particles known as aerosols.

Aerosols are these tiny particles that are suspended in the atmosphere and they’re many times smaller than the human hair.

They can scatter and absorb light and can affect clouds.

Studies have shown that volcanic aerosols can change the properties of water droplets that make up clouds.

To learn more about these changes, scientists analyzed several years of observations from NASA and European Space Agency satellites.

They specifically looked at how the properties of water droplets changed around active volcanoes.

To avoid interference from other aerosol sources, such as city pollution, researchers compared three isolated islands with volcanic activity to three islands without.

Around the islands with no volcanic activity, water droplets were mostly unaffected.

But around the islands with volcanic activity, water droplets were smaller and the clouds appeared brighter.

Clouds with smaller droplets tend to be brighter and reflect more heat energy back into space.

If the amount of heat reflected back to space changes, this can affect things like rainfall and winds.

Learning more about aerosols and how they interact with clouds will help scientists like me to better understand and predict future weather and climate.