Cloud Formation

There is a lot of interesting. What forms these clouds, why are these clouds there, why do they sort of stick around? At the center, every cloud drop has a particle. You can't grow a cloud drop without having a particle there for the water to condense on. The key question that people not directly address until very recently is what actually forms these clouds. So for once you're looking out at over the ocean, turns out sea spray, sea salt is a very effective nucleus for forming clouds. So it's a really good chance that those are loaded with sea salt. But if you go inland, you start to have pollution come from all kinds of places, and so different sources form clouds more effectively than others, and we're trying to unravel which sources are actually contributing to the clouds. The clouds are incredibly important players in climate change, and that they reflect the white, they reflect the light back into space and so they're keeping things much, much cooler than they would be if they weren't there. They also play a huge role in regional weather, so in actuality, we're starting to see shifts where having more pollution input into the clouds is affecting weather patterns, in particular, is actually reducing the precipitation so we're starting to see drought in areas with super high levels of air pollution.