The phrase
"water clouds" refers to clouds that are made up mostly of water droplets.
Full definition
Han, Q., W.B. Rossow, J. Zeng, and R. Welch, 2002: Three different behaviors of liquid water path
of water clouds in aerosol - cloud interactions.
Measurements of the relation between aerosol properties and microphysics and chemistry of low level liquid
water clouds in Northern Finland.
MacFarlane, S.F., K.F. Evans, and A.S. Ackerman, 2002: A Bayesian algorithm for the retrieval of
liquid water cloud properties from microwave radiometer and millimeter radar data.
Lin, B., B. Wielicki, P. Minnis, and W. Rossow, 1998: Estimation of
water cloud properties from satellite microwave, infrared and visible measurements in oceanic environments: 1.
Raypierre's climate book in Chapter 5 gives a good overview of scattering, particularly Rayleigh and Mie scattering which help explain things why aerosols scatter light, why the sky appears blue, why CO2 clouds (say on ancient Mars) can scatter infrared radiation good but
water clouds on Earth don't have that effect, etc..
His conclusion: «The almond - milk industry is selling you a jug of
filtered water clouded by a handful of ground almonds.»
Previous observations of the brown dwarf, published in 2014, provided tentative indications of
water clouds based on very limited photometric data.
Unfortunately, no one was sure whether interstellar clouds held enough water to do the trick — the water vapor in our own atmosphere makes it difficult for ground telescopes to measure
whatever water the clouds may contain.
Previous studies using three - dimensional climate models have shown that slowly rotating plants orbiting these low - mass stars should develop
thick water clouds form at substellar point, at the point at which the star is directly overhead, which should increase the reflectivity, and thus stabilize the planet against increased warming at the inner edge of the habitable zone.
Comparison between the Galileo probe and this study suggests that these fast - moving clouds within hot spots are deeper than 3 bars and are therefore
probably water clouds.
Water clouds befuddle aerosol - monitoring satellites below about 9 miles above Earth's surface, so any aerosols in low, polar stratosphere were potentially missing, Ridley said.
«These clouds account for the high reflectivity of Venus, but because they also reflect infrared back to the surface (
unlike water clouds, which absorb and emit)»
«Astronomers find evidence of
water clouds in first spectrum of coldest brown dwarf: Difficult spectroscopic observations reveal properties of the coldest known object outside of our solar system.»
Scientists believe Saturn's atmosphere is a layered sandwich of sorts, with a deck
of water clouds at the bottom, ammonia hydrosulfide clouds in the middle, and ammonia clouds near the top, just below an upper tropospheric haze of unknown composition that obscures almost everything.
«We would expect an object that cold to have
water clouds, and this is the best evidence that it does,» said Andrew Skemer, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.
«It starts at
the water cloud level and develops a huge convective tower.
For the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich he created an illuminated «Wasserwolke» (
Water cloud).
«Once you start cutting, visibility drops from 30 feet to zero because
the water clouds up with particles and tiny creatures that get shaken loose,» [diver Cinde MacGugan] said.
The RF due to the cloud albedo effect (also referred to as first indirect or Twomey effect), in the context of liquid
water clouds, is estimated to be — 0.7 -LSB--- 1.1, +0.4] W m — 2, with a low level of scientific understanding.
Water clouds have both cooling effects (due to reflection) and warming effects (due to infrared properties of water).
Your description above does apply in practice to the special case of Earth's
water clouds, because they absorb thermal IR flux so strongly that you can ignore scattering.