Abstract
This document describes data files containing variables calculated in the analysis presented in "Negligible Contribution from Aerosols to Recent Trends in Earth’s Energy Imbalance" by Park and Soden (2025).
The data cover the 60°S–60°N latitude band, with a focus on oceanic regions, and span monthly records from January 2003 to December 2018. This period avoids potential biases introduced by MODIS satellite orbit drift (beginning in early 2020) as well as extreme episodic aerosol emission events such as the 2019–2020 Australian wildfires and the 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai volcanic eruption.
susceptibility_with_activation.nc: This file contains the susceptibility of the non-obscured shortwave low-cloud radiative effect (SW_lcld, from CERES FluxByCldTyp Ed. 4.1) to aerosol concentrations, using either the aerosol index (AI) from MODIS or sulfate mass concentration (SO₄) from the MERRA-2 reanalysis. The calculation explicitly incorporates the aerosol activation rate, following Eq. (2) in Park et al. (2025), and is derived through a cloud controlling factor (CCF) analysis. The CCF framework includes six environmental factors from MERRA-2—sea surface temperature, estimated inversion strength, horizontal surface temperature advection, relative humidity at 700 hPa, vertical velocity at 700 hPa, and near-surface wind speed—as well as MODIS-derived cloud droplet number concentration (Nd). This approach isolates the contribution of aerosol variations to cloud microphysical properties and radiative effects, while controlling for meteorological influences.
All other data used in the paper are publicly available from their respective repositories and are listed in the “Data and materials availability” section of the manuscript.
C. Park, B. J. Soden, R. J. Kramer, T. S. L’Ecuyer, H. He, Observational constraints suggest a smaller effective radiative forcing from aerosol–cloud interactions. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 25, 7299–7313 (2025).