New research tracking the albedo of our planet—its ability to reflect sunlight—has revealed that a complex interplay of periodical weather patterns in the Pacific Ocean affects our overall cloud cover, especially in the sky west of the Americas. This in turn has a large impact on the amount of light absorbed rather than reflected from the Earth.
“The reflectivity of the Earth is mainly a story of clouds,” says Philip Goode, a physics professor at the Big Bear Solar Observatory run by the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Goode and his colleagues were examining data gathered from the Big Bear Solar Observatory in Southern California from 1998 to 2017. They examined both the amount of light reflected off the surface of the Earth onto the moon and back, called earthshine, and satellite measurements of the Earth.
In a study published recently in Geophysical Research Letters, they found that on average ...
