Will climate change really make the clouds in the sky less?

"To be sure, the impact of climate change on cloud cover exists, and the global impact of cloud cover change is also a major problem facing scientists at present." Sun, researcher of lasg and deputy director of the Key Laboratory of Cloud Precipitation Physics and Severe Storm, made this statement in the recent "Weather Direct Attack-Chatting with Scientists" held by China Meteorological Bureau.

The commemorative theme of this year's World Meteorological Day is "Seeing the clouds and knowing the sky", and the chat about "the sky" on that day also revolves around this topic. For ordinary people, the cloud is sometimes a kind of goodwill, such as "Don't lose face, look at the flowers in bloom before the court;" I didn't mean to stay or stay, and the clouds in the sky were rolling. Sometimes not, for example, dark clouds are crushing the city and trying to destroy it. "However, from a scientific point of view, the cloud is far more important than we thought.

Cloud is a visible polymer floating in the air composed of water droplets, supercooled water droplets, ice crystals or condensed water vapor in the atmosphere. Don't underestimate these clouds. They are an important part of the water cycle and are extremely important for the birth of life on earth. Although people can't see water vapor or atmospheric movement with naked eyes, they can understand every move of atmospheric movement from the evolution of clouds.

In the view of scientists, as the cloud continues to rise and cool, or the water vapor outside the cloud continues to be input into the cloud, water droplets or ice crystals in the cloud continue to gather, so that the updraft can no longer "stay up", and these water vapor condensates will fall from the cloud to form precipitation weather such as rain, snow and hail, and water will return to the surface, or infiltrate into the soil, or flow into rivers, lakes and seas, and then evaporate, condense and fall, and so on. It is this cycle that constantly updates the water resources on which life depends.

However, in recent years, studies have found that climate change seems to be reducing the existence of clouds. After an overall assessment of clouds in different spaces, scientists found that the global total cloud volume was decreasing in the 20 years after 1984. Is it true?/You don't say. /You don't say.

During the day's activities, Sun talked about the changes of clouds under the background of climate change, saying that ocean-going oil tankers would emit some smoke when passing by. Above this route, the size of the cloud will become smaller and the cloud droplets will increase. However, he also mentioned that the verification of scientific hypotheses is always a process of overthrow and reconstruction, and it is still difficult for scientists to directly establish a simple linear relationship about climate warming and cloud changes.