Airborne Mission Looks at Fires and Cooling Atlantic Cloud Decks

A new NASA airborne field experiment planned for this summer will make key airborne measurements of clouds and smoke particles over the southeastern Atlantic Ocean to help scientists understand a major challenge to our understanding of climate science.

Read More:
Clouds over the southern Atlantic Ocean are overlain by smoke (seen with the CALIPSO lidar satellite) from biomass burning fires over southern Africa, which move westward with the prevailing tropical winds. ORACLES will try to answer the question of how these smoke layers interact with the underlying clouds and affect the amount of sunlight they reflect back to space. Credits: NASA