Preprints
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2408.07207
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2408.07207
14 Nov 2024
 | 14 Nov 2024

Lightning declines over shipping lanes following regulation of fuel sulfur emissions

Chris J. Wright, Joel A. Thornton, Lyatt Jaeglé, Yang Cao, Yannian Zhu, Jihu Liu, Randall Jones II, Robert H. Holzworth, Daniel Rosenfeld, Robert Wood, Peter Blossey, and Daehyun Kim

Abstract. Aerosol interactions with clouds represent a significant uncertainty in our understanding of the Earth system. Deep convective clouds may respond to aerosol perturbations in several ways that have proven difficult to elucidate with observations. Here, we leverage the two busiest maritime shipping lanes in the world, which emit aerosol particles and their precursors into an otherwise relatively clean tropical marine boundary layer, to make headway on the influence of aerosol on deep convective clouds. The recent seven-fold change in allowable fuel sulfur by the International Maritime Organization allows us to test the sensitivity of the lightning to changes in ship plume aerosol size distributions. We find that, across a range of atmospheric thermodynamic conditions, the previously documented enhancement of lightning over the shipping lanes has fallen by over 40 %. The enhancement is therefore at least partially aerosol-mediated, a conclusion that is supported by observations of droplet number at cloud base, which show a similar decline over the shipping lane. These results have fundamental implications for our understanding of aerosol-cloud interactions, suggesting that deep convective clouds are impacted by the aerosol number distribution in the remote marine environment.

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Journal article(s) based on this preprint

11 Mar 2025
| ACP Letters
| Highlight paper
Lightning declines over shipping lanes following regulation of fuel sulfur emissions
Chris J. Wright, Joel A. Thornton, Lyatt Jaeglé, Yang Cao, Yannian Zhu, Jihu Liu, Randall Jones II, Robert Holzworth, Daniel Rosenfeld, Robert Wood, Peter Blossey, and Daehyun Kim
Atmos. Chem. Phys., 25, 2937–2946, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-25-2937-2025,https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-25-2937-2025, 2025
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The requested preprint has a corresponding peer-reviewed final revised paper. You are encouraged to refer to the final revised version.

Our understanding of the impact of aerosol particles on deep-convective clouds is still...
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Aerosol particles influence clouds, which exert a large forcing on solar radiation and fresh...
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