AOPP Seminar - Is it cake? Using natural experiments to assess aerosol impacts on cloud processes

With improvements to the global observational networks and model fidelity, climate models are getting increasingly good at producing an accurate cloud climatology. However, we are making increasingly challenging demands of models - they not only need to get things right ''on average'', but for proposed intentional perturbations of clouds (such as marine cloud brightening), they must be right for individual cases. In this talk, we look at how inadvertent perturbations (so-called 'natural experiments') can be used to identify the role of different processes and assess how well models simulate them. In a similar way to poking a cake, by "poking" clouds to measure their response, we can see if model clouds work in the same way as real ones, or if they just look superficially similar.