Interactions Among Aerosols, Clouds, and Radiation

A special issue of Atmosphere (ISSN 2073-4433). This special issue belongs to the section "Aerosols".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 12 June 2026 | Viewed by 714

Special Issue Editors


E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Lynker@Enviromental Model Center (EMC), National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Silver Spring, MD 20740, USA
Interests: clouds and radiation interactions

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Civil Engineering, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX 76013, USA
Interests: extremes & tropical cyclones; S2S predictability; energy resilience; GHGs; maritime weather routing

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue will advance current understanding of aerosol–cloud–radiation interactions and their implications for weather and climate systems. We invite contributions that employ observational, theoretical, and modeling approaches to investigate the physical and dynamical processes governing these interactions across multiple spatial and temporal scales.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Observational studies of aerosols, clouds, and radiation using satellite remote sensing, ground-based networks, radar, and lidar measurements, emphasizing understanding of the processes involved and comparison between aspects;
  • Model development and evaluation related to aerosol, cloud, and radiation processes, encompassing large-eddy simulations (LESs), cloud-permitting and regional models, chemistry–climate models, and numerical weather prediction frameworks;
  • Process-level investigations of cloud microphysics and aerosol–cloud interactions, including ice nucleation, cloud droplet activation, autoconversion, accretion, deposition, evaporation, and the dynamics of stratocumulus, shallow cumulus, and deep convective systems;
  • Aerosol-influenced meteorological and climatic phenomena, such as monsoon systems over South Asia, East Asia, North America, and Africa; wildfires and biomass burning; climate change and global warming; the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO); and Rossby wave dynamics.
  • Advancing Energy Resilience through Cloud-Based Solar Forecasting.

This Special Issue will integrate multidisciplinary perspectives and state-of-the-art methodologies to improve the representation of aerosol–cloud–radiation processes in models and enhance the predictability of weather and climate systems.

Dr. Anning Cheng
Dr. Shanru Tian
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • aerosol–cloud–radiation interactions
  • cloud microphysics and dynamics
  • atmospheric observations (satellite, radar, lidar)
  • model development and evaluation
  • large-eddy and cloud-permitting simulations
  • numerical weather prediction and climate modeling
  • aerosol impacts on monsoon systems
  • wildfires and aerosol–climate feedbacks
  • climate variability and teleconnections (ENSO, Rossby waves)
  • chemistry–climate modeling
  • process-level understanding of cloud–aerosol coupling

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

22 pages, 8092 KB  
Article
Direct and Indirect Effects of Aerosols During the 2023 Canadian Wildfires
by Anning Cheng, Li Pan, Partha S. Bhattacharjee and Fanglin Yang
Atmosphere 2026, 17(4), 337; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos17040337 - 26 Mar 2026
Viewed by 364
Abstract
This modeling study investigates the impact of the 2023 Canadian wildfire aerosols (primarily black carbon and organic aerosol) on weather forecasts, concluding that incorporating real-time aerosol forcing improves model performance over using climatology. Experiments without real-time data severely underestimated aerosol optical depth (AOD), [...] Read more.
This modeling study investigates the impact of the 2023 Canadian wildfire aerosols (primarily black carbon and organic aerosol) on weather forecasts, concluding that incorporating real-time aerosol forcing improves model performance over using climatology. Experiments without real-time data severely underestimated aerosol optical depth (AOD), an error mitigated by including the forcing or using the coupled atmosphere–chemistry model. The aerosols exerted a strong direct radiative effect, reducing surface downward shortwave (SW) flux and generating corresponding surface cooling over the wildfire region. Furthermore, including aerosol–cloud interactions amplified this cooling and led to an increase in the overall cloud fraction and precipitation, illustrating complex indirect effects. While these physical improvements enhanced the representation of the atmosphere, the positive impact on overall medium-range forecasting performance (5–10 days) was modest, suggesting that the benefits of accurately representing wildfire feedback on the coupled Earth system are achieved through relatively slow processes, such as radiation feedback. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Interactions Among Aerosols, Clouds, and Radiation)
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