Effects of ship wakes on ocean brightness and radiative forcing over ocean

C. K Gatebe; E Wilcox; R Poudyal; J Wang

doi:10.1029/2011GL048819

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Effects of ship wakes on ocean brightness and radiative forcing over ocean

Journal article

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Peer reviewed

Effects of ship wakes on ocean brightness and radiative forcing over ocean

C. K Gatebe, E Wilcox, R Poudyal and J Wang

Geophysical research letters, Vol.38(17), L17702

09/2011

DOI: 10.1029/2011GL048819

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Abstract

Changes in surface albedo represent one of the main forcing agents that can counteract, to some extent, the positive forcing from increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Here, we report on enhanced ocean reflectance from ship wakes over the Pacific Ocean near the California coast, where we determined, based on airborne radiation measurements that ship wakes can increase reflected sunlight by more than 100%. We assessed the importance of this increase to climate forcing, where we estimated the global radiative forcing of ship wakes to be −(0.14 ± 50%) mWm−2 assuming a global distribution of 32331 ships of size ≥100000 gross tonnage. The forcing is smaller than the forcing of aircraft contrails (−0.007 to +0.02 Wm−2), but considering that the global shipping fleet has rapidly grown in the last five decades and this trend is likely to continue because of the need of more inter‐continental transportation as a result of economic globalization, we argue that the radiative forcing of wakes is expected to be increasingly important especially in harbors and coastal regions. Key Points Unique angular spectral radiance measurements of ship wake Albedo change caused by moving ships could have a bearing on climate forcing Human influence on ocean albedo is neglected in the current IPCC assessments

ARCTAS

bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF)

radiative forcing

Cloud Absorption Radiometer (CAR)

ocean albedo

aircraft

Details

Title: Subtitle: Effects of ship wakes on ocean brightness and radiative forcing over ocean
Creators: C. K Gatebe - NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
E Wilcox - Desert Research Institute
R Poudyal - Science Systems and Applications, Inc
J Wang - University of Nebraska‐Lincoln
Resource Type: Journal article
Publication Details: Geophysical research letters, Vol.38(17), L17702
DOI: 10.1029/2011GL048819
ISSN: 0094-8276
eISSN: 1944-8007
Number of pages: 6
Language: English
Date published: 09/2011
Academic Unit: Electrical and Computer Engineering; Civil and Environmental Engineering; Physics and Astronomy; Chemical and Biochemical Engineering
Record Identifier: 9984104910402771

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