Clouds Could Be Saying Something About Climate Change

Clouds may look like cotton candy in the sky, but their changing patterns may actually have more impact than we thought: a new study suggested that cloud patterns have been shifting in the past 20 years, and could have been responding to rising greenhouse levels.

In this warming world, clouds are moving higher into the atmosphere. https://t.co/iteKKo1qks #climatechange pic.twitter.com/XEaGtxWgvE

— Greenpeace (@Greenpeace) July 11, 2016

They may look like simple puffs in the sky, but to study them correctly, scientists have to understand them, forcing to track behavior of tiny water droplets and even masses of clouds that could span hundreds of miles wide.

The study, according to Inside Climate News, provided a record spanning nearly three decades, bringing researchers that much closer to the cloud-climate relationship. Most models have projected that global warming would cause the tops of clouds to move higher in the atmosphere, triggering a decrease of cloudiness and expanding the dry zone. These models predicted that these patterns will trigger more warming, creating a feedback loop.

Joel Norris, a climate researcher at Scripps and lead author of the study said, "What this paper brings to the table is the first credible demonstration that the cloud changes we expect from climate models and theory are currently happening."

Science Daily noted that authors were alos able to assess the causes of the observed trends using a variety of model simulations with and without human influence, volcanoes, and other external factors. The new findings said that there has been more evidence showing clouds as exacerbating factors on climate change instead of mitigating ones.

Still, despite the study being able to identify general changes in cloud patterns, it did not attempt to measure and quantify the changes, which makes it difficult to predict changing cloud patterns and how they could impact regional weather phenomena, among other things.