Cloudsat Principle Investigator Graeme Stephens joins the webcast now to explain CloudSat’s mission
and answer your questions submitted to the NASA Question Board. Welcome, Dr. Stephens.
Thanks, Tiffany.
Our first question comes from Pawan from Sharjah: Taking into consideration that our weather is changing,
how are clouds affected by it or affecting it?
And how will they be affected in the future if our climate gets worse or changes in any other way?
Well, that's a great question, Pawan. That's a million-dollar question, in many respects, for the climate problem.
You know, as air gets lifted, water condenses, water vapor condenses into cloud droplets and rain form.
And as the rain form, this releases heat into the atmosphere, and that heat fuels the weather systems of our, of our climate.
In addition to that, clouds also reflect sunlight, and they also play a very important role in terms of regulating the Earth's greenhouse effect.
And through the reflection of sunlight and the greenhouse influence, they also greatly affect our climate system.
Now, we know weather effects clouds and shapes our cloud systems,
and we know the changes in climate is likely to introduce an influence on the clouds as well,
but we just cannot answer the question of how climate change and change clouds.
So it's a really great question, and it's part of the puzzle of the cloud climate problem that CloudSat's going to try to address.