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than a few moments of darkness during the daylight hours. And one effect that might surprise you? Clouds dissipate, and quickly – from the point at which just 15 percent of the Sun is obscured by the Moon.
A team led by Victor Trees of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and Delft University of Technology has determined that, in particular, shallow cumulus clouds over land vamoose with alacrity.."Fewer clouds could partly oppose the intended effect of climate engineering, because clouds reflect sunlight and thus actually help to cool down the Earth." The evolution of cloud cover during a 2005 solar eclipse. The right column shows the cloud cover after correcting for the Moon's shadow. ( From our vantage point here on Earth's surface, figuring out how clouds behave during an eclipse is not easy.is blocking some of the Sun's rays from reaching Earth's lower atmosphere. While modeling suggests this could effectively lower temperatures, we don't know what other effects it might have. Because cloud layers can be quite complex, and cloud configurations are constantly in motion, counting clouds from Earth is not really a viable method of determining how solar dimming affects clouds. Another option is to study them from above using satellites, but previously these have not taken the Moon's shadow during the eclipse into account in calculations of cloudtop reflectivity, resulting in a bias in measurements of cloud cover and thickness. Trees and his colleagues figured out a way of correcting for the lunar shadow by taking into account the proportion of the Sun that is being obscured by any given time, from each location on Earth's surface. "By far most of the solar eclipse consists of a partial eclipse, where there is still plenty of light outside,"The researchers applied their methods to data collected during three previous solar eclipses over the African continent, between 2005 and 2016. To their surprise, cumulus clouds start disappearing in large numbers when just 15 percent of the Sun is covered, and they disappear until the eclipse has ended.. These simulations showed that when the sunlight is blocked, the surface cools, which reduces the updrafts of warm air from the surface.So, when the ground cools, and these updrafts cease, cumulus clouds can't be sustained, recommencing only when the Sun re-emerges and starts warming the ground again. This effect occurs only over land, since the ocean doesn't cool quickly enough for the effect to kick in.Since this is sort of the opposite of what scientists want to happen, the phenomenon warrants further investigation, the researchers say.
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