During the solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, a smoke plume passed over Columbus, Georgia and the Columbus State University campus, from where I was observing it. I later compared the surface observations at Columbus Airport – just a couple of miles from campus – with observations at regional, smoke-free airports, and found that the temperature was nearly constant at Columbus for over half an hour, and that the temperature didn’t drop as much as at the other stations. It appeared that the smoke was buffering the temperature. But how?
I dug into the literature, reading many papers on a variety of topics. I found that my first hypothesis of a simple radiative feedback was unsupported, and so I explored the literature more deeply and re-visited my observations, only to propose a new feedback: the Subcritical Aerosol-Moisture Feedback (SAMF). I described how SAMF came to be in Through the Haze: An Atmospheric Detective Story.
I recently presented as part of Columbus State’s Department of Earth and Space Sciences seminar series, including some new updates from data I collected this past winter. I still can’t prove that SAMF exists, but I can constrain its possible influence: it could be a small but significant effect under higher concentrations of aerosol particles. Below, I share this presentation, with moderately-edited subtitles (there are still some mistakes). The presentation is for a general audience of Earth sciences undergraduates, so it is not overly technical, but I do discuss some statistical methods in a (hopefully) accessible manner. I adjusted the color so the figures are somewhat easier to see.
Enjoy!
