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 -0.00014 plus or minus 53% Watts per square meter assuming a global distribution of 32331 ships of size of greater than or equal to 100000 gross tonnage. The forcing is smaller than the forcing of aircraft contrails (-0.007 to +0.02 Watts per square meter), 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.


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    Title :

    Radiative Forcing Over Ocean by Ship Wakes


    Contributors:
    Gatebe, Charles K. (author) / Wilcox, E. (author) / Poudyal, R. (author) / Wang, J. (author)

    Conference:

    2011 Fall AGU Meeting ; 2011 ; San Francisco, CA, United States


    Publication date :

    2011-12-05


    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English


    Keywords :



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