On the cause-and-effect relations between aerosols, water vapor, and clouds over East Asia
2021
Stathopoulos, Stavros | Tsonis, Anastasios A. | Kourtidis, Konstantinos
Atmosphere is a complex dynamical system. Here, we investigated the causal links between aerosols, water vapor, and clouds, using the convergent cross mapping (CCM) method, which is based on nonlinear state space reconstruction. We utilized remote sensing data of aerosol optical depth at 550 nm (AOD), water vapor (WV), cloud cover (CC), cloud optical depth (COD), cloud effective radius-ice (CERI), and cloud effective radius-liquid (CERL) from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer (MODIS) sensor over East Asia, for the period 2003–2018. Our analysis shows that there is a bidirectional forcing between AOD, CC, and COD which could be attributed to the invigoration effect of aerosols on clouds. In addition, there is a bidirectional forcing between AOD and WV and AOD and CERL, which could be attributed to the first indirect effect of aerosols on clouds, while there is no causality among AOD and CERI, probably because of strong coupling among aerosols and ice nuclei. Based on our analysis, we conclude that CCM method can effectively be used in all aerosol–cloud interactions’ studies, searching for causality among the parameters.
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