Invisible Ship Tracks Show Large Cloud Sensitivity to Aerosol

Peter Manshausen1* , Duncan Watson-Parris1 , Matthew Christensen2 , and Philip

Stier1
1
Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, University of Oxford,
Oxford OX1 3PU, UK
2
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA
*
Correspondence: peter.manshausen@physics.ox.ac.uk

November 2021

Abstract

Cloud reflectivity is sensitive to atmospheric aerosol concentrations because aerosols

provide the condensation nuclei around which water condenses 1 . Increased aerosol
concentrations due to human activity affect droplet number concentration, liquid wa-
ter and cloud fraction 2 , but these changes are subject to large uncertainties 3 . Ship
tracks, long lines of polluted clouds that are visible in satellite images, are one of the
main tools for quantifying aerosol-cloud-interactions 4 . However, only a fraction of the
clouds polluted by shipping show ship tracks 5,6 . Here we show that even when no
ship tracks are visible in satellite images, aerosol emissions significantly change cloud
properties. We apply a new method accounting for all clouds polluted by shipping,
showing a significant cloud droplet number increase and a more positive liquid wa-
ter response when there are no visible tracks. For the first time we directly detect
shipping-induced cloud property changes in the trade cumulus regions of the Atlantic.
Our results indicate that previous studies of ship tracks were strongly biased by select-
ing only visible tracks from satellite imagery. The strong liquid water path response
we find translates to a larger aerosol cooling effect on the climate, potentially masking
a higher climate sensitivity than observations would otherwise suggest.

Introduction
Global warming caused by greenhouse gases has been partially masked by anthropogenic
aerosols. The latest report of the IPCC’s working group 1 3 estimates the combined forcing
of aerosols to be between (–2.0 to –0.6) W m–2 . This cooling results partly from reflection
of solar radiation by aerosol particles (direct effect) and to a larger part from adjustments
to cloud properties (indirect effect). While the direct effect has been well constrained,
cloud property changes contribute the largest uncertainty of anthropogenic climate forc-
ing 3,7 .

1
The indirect effect stems from aerosols acting as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), on
which water condenses in supersaturated air. An increase in CCN causes an increase in
cloud droplet number (Nd ), if the total amount of liquid water does not decrease, brighten-
ing clouds 1 . But the liquid water path (LWP, a strong control on albedo) can change after
a change in droplet number. The droplets’ reduced size makes collisions less frequent and
can suppress precipitation, increasing LWP and the area covered by clouds (cloud fraction,
CF) in polluted regions 2 . By changing the entrainment and mixing processes with the
surrounding air, increased Nd can also lower LWP 8,9 . Observations from volcanic erup-
tions suggest that the overall effect of aerosols on LWP is weak 10 . Toll et al. 11 argue that
this is because decreases and increases in LWP almost balance out and suggest climate
models which show an increase in LWP with aerosol suffer from poor parameterization
and overestimate aerosol-cloud cooling. As global climate models do not resolve shallow
convection, the LWP response they predict has a strong dependence on parameterization 12 .

Apart from competing processes with opposite effects, aerosol cloud interactions are hard
to quantify observationally due to confounding processes, where a common cause changes
both retrieved aerosol and cloud properties 13,14 . Measurements can be confounded by
relative humidity, airmass history (continental air tends to be more polluted and drier
than oceanic air 15 ) and correlated retrieval errors 16 . This leads to correlations of aerosols
and cloud properties in observations, which do not reflect causation. Various ways to
overcome this problem have been proposed, either by accounting for possible confounders
using a Lagrangian framework 17 or by using an intermediate variable which enforces a
causal link 18 . So called ‘opportunistic experiments’ or ‘natural laboratories’, where the
cause of the aerosol perturbation is known and localized in time and space, are maybe the
most widely used approach to quantify aerosol cloud interactions 4 . They allow for a direct
comparison of polluted and unpolluted clouds excluding possible confounders, except for
retrieval errors.

Ship tracks, linear cloud features of increased reflectivity and cloud cover over the global
oceans, are the most prominent example of such opportunistic experiments. They were
first reported by Conover 19 and are attributed to the aerosol emissions of ships, mainly
sulfate precursors and black carbon 6 . They have been studied extensively to constrain
aerosol cloud interactions 6,5,20,21 . Previous ship track studies have provided evidence for
negative LWP responses to aerosol 11,22 . If this negative response is large enough, it can
even lead to ‘cloud dimming’, the opposite of the expected aerosol effect 23 .

However, the use of ship tracks to quantify aerosol influences on cloud properties in-
troduces a selection bias. With respect to space, Possner et al. 24 suggest that visible ship
tracks are mostly sampled from shallow boundary layers (<800 m). Using large eddy sim-
ulations (LES), they show that in deep boundary layers, the microphysical response to an

2
aerosol source are hidden by natural variability, but are detectable by averaging along the
emission trajectory. Further simulation show a stronger LWP decrease in deeper boundary
layers 25 . With respect to time and still using LES, Glassmeier et al. 26 find that entrain-
ment reductions in LWP occur on timescales of ca. 20h. They argue that by this time,
most ship tracks are broken up and that ship track studies therefore underestimate the
negative LWP response in non-precipitating clouds. Addressing the selection bias in space
it is possible to compare entire regions of high and low shipping emissions 21,27 . Recent
work by Gryspeerdt et al. 28 used ship positions and emissions data to convert the distance
along the ship track to time since the emission of cloud-perturbing aerosol. However, open
questions remain about the justification for generalizing from ship track studies to global
sensitivities.

In this study, we show that relying on visible ship tracks introduces a large selection
bias. We propose a method, which takes into account emissions that do not cause visible
tracks. Ship emissions are used to establish a best estimate of where clouds were influ-
enced by aerosols and to compare these locations to locations without ship emissions. The
analysis does not rely on hand-logged ship track locations, but only on aerosol emission
data. We thereby remove the selection bias for visible track formation. This leads to
significantly larger positive LWP responses to the aerosols emitted by ships.

Finding Invisible Ship Tracks

Previous work has largely relied on the identification of ship tracks by eye from near-
infrared satellite imagery (e.g. 2.1 or 3.7 µm channels) and logging their positions by
hand 20,28,29 . Here, we use data sets of ship emissions, which are advected with the wind
until the time of the overpass of MODIS Aqua and Terra, respectively. The satellite re-
trieved cloud properties at these locations are the ones subject to aerosol pollution by
ships. We compare these to clouds in unpolluted locations. These locations are chosen
nearby the predicted location of advected aerosol, such that the meteorological condi-
tions are similar. In the special case of visible ship tracks, the in-track and out-of-track
properties are retrieved, just like in the hand-logging ship track studies mentioned above.
Crucially, retrieval of polluted and unpolluted cloud properties also happens in the more
common case of ship emissions that do not produce visible tracks.

Fig. 1 exemplifies our approach: The framed retrieval sections are estimates of where
aerosol has been carried by the wind between the times of their emission and the satellite
retrieval. Three cases can be distinguished: 1) A ship track is visible and it lies within the
retrieval section. 2) No ship track is visible but there is a retrieval section. 3) A ship track
is visible but (partly) outside of any retrieval section. Some of the scenes falling into cases
2) and 3) will arise because of imperfect collocation of advected emissions with satellite
retrievals. However, case 2) scenes would arise even with perfect collocation. Only a frac-
tion of shipping emissions actually form visible ship tracks 27 . This becomes very clear on

3
 (a) Emission locations (b) Emissions transported by winds

(c) Emission locations no visible tracks (d) Emissions transported and counterfactual

Figure 1: A view of the Chilean stratocumulus deck in false colours, indicating cloud
droplet effective radius. Grey boxes show the location of emissions (a) and where
they are advected to with the wind (b). There are visible ship tracks in darker
colours, most of which are well collocated to advected ship emissions. MODIS Aqua
on 06/08/2018. c) shows same region but for a day without visible ship tracks, even
though there are ships. d) again shows advected emission locations and additionally
the counterfactual retrieval boxes to either side of them (yellow boxes). MODIS
Aqua on 14/09/2019, selected ships.

4
days when there are no visible ship tracks at all, as shown in c) and d). Scenes that fall in
case 3) can stem from imperfect collocation or ships missing from the emissions data set.

Figure 2: Comparing Nd and LWP in the Chilean Sc between those days when ship tracks
are visible (blue) and those when none are visible (orange) in the region. Plotted are
ratios of hourly means of in-track and out-of track properties, so that a value larger
than 0% means an enhancement in the track. Shaded areas show standard errors of
the means. LWP anomalies are shown for reff < 15 only, i.e. likely non-precipitating
clouds. See Fig. S 1 for the case reff > 15. Retrievals from MODIS-cloud product
on Aqua and Terra, all of 2018, 31% of days with visible tracks.

Visible vs. invisible tracks

The effect of ship emissions on cloud properties can be detected even if no tracks are visible
by eye in an effective radius retrieval. To show this, we focus on the regions of the Chilean
and Namibian Sc decks known to display visible ship tracks. We separate days by eye
when there are any visible ship tracks (quasi linear cloud features with a discernible head)
in the region of interest, like Fig. 1 a) and b), from those days when there are none, like
c) and d). This ensures high confidence in the retrievals labelled ‘invisible’. In the ‘visible’
category, some retrievals may not actually be related to visible ship tracks. This can be for
different reasons such as local meteorology, low emission amount or imperfect collocation.
Taking this ‘invisible’-conservative approach, we make sure that the invisible ship tracks
we find could not have been retrieved using the conventional hand-logging approach, as
on that day not a single ship track is visible. Nevertheless, this is only for the purposes of
highlighting the historical bias and our final determination of global LWP sensitivity does
not depend on this distinction.

Fig. 2 shows a comparison of cloud properties on days with visible tracks and days with
no visible tracks. Plotted are the ratios of in-track over out-of-track hourly averaged Nd
(left) and LWP (right) retrievals. In all three cases, there is a large enhancement in Nd
even on days when no ship tracks can be seen by eye. This surprising result could indicate
‘blurred’ tracks, which cannot easily seen by eye. These diffuse changes could become
apparent when averaging over the length of the track 24 or over many tracks, like here
(about 600 are needed, see below). Ship tracks may also be invisible in the effective radius
retrieval, but visible in droplet number. This occurs when the droplet number increases
together with the liquid water content, as shown in S1 of Gryspeerdt et al. 28

5
The LWP response is plotted only in clouds with effective droplet radius reff < 15 µm,
below which clouds are unlikely to precipitate 30 . Contrary to the Nd response, the non-
precipitating LWP response is markedly different between the visible and the invisible
case. While, in agreement with results from Toll et al. 11 , the response in the visible case
is weakly negative, it turns weakly positive in the invisible case. Figure S 1 shows the
response in the likely precipitating case. This data is more sparse and therefore noisy.
However, again agreeing with Toll et al. 11 , the LWP response here is positive. In the
invisible case this positive response is stronger than in the visible case.

To answer the question why some tracks are invisible, we study the background mete-
orological state. Fig. S 3 shows meteorological conditions from ERA5 reanalysis data
for ‘invisible’ and ‘visible’ retrievals. Visible ship tracks occur in cloud decks that are
more stable, shallower, lie above colder sea surfaces and higher relative humidity condi-
tions. These findings are consistent with those obtained over the North Pacific by Durkee
et al. 31 . All of these differences are more marked for the two years of data in the Chilean
Sc than in the Namibian Sc decks.

Invisible Ship Tracks Everywhere

Invisible ship tracks can also be detected in regions that have not been widely studied for
ship tracks previously. One such area is the East Atlantic around Cabo Verde; addition-
ally we study the Northeast Atlantic around the Azores. Both of these tend to have lower
cloud fractions and the low clouds are mostly shallow cumulus (Cu). These two regions,
as well as the Chilean and Namibian Sc are shown in Fig 3. All regions show similar rela-
tive Nd anomalies and time-evolutions. However, LWP responses are markedly different.
Importantly, the region that was not previously studied, the trade cumulus region of Cabo
Verde, shows the largest LWP enhancement. In all cases, there is little time development
of LWP. Albedo enhancement is dominated by LWP enhancement and follows a similar
pattern, although some time dependence can be seen with a maximum in the first five
hours. Similarly to the LWP response, the albedo response is largest in the Cabo Verde
region.

The pattern of strong LWP response in the trade cumulus regions is confirmed in Fig. 4.
Plotted are the ratios of regional means of in-track and out-of-track properties. The
response in Nd (implicitly averaged over all times since emission) is almost everywhere
positive and uniform in magnitude. The response in LWP however can be in either di-
rection and shows a strong geographical dependence. The most positive response in LWP
appears in the trade wind regions on either side of the equator.

Higher LWP sensitivity in the trades correlates with weak or negative inversions and low
background Nd , shown in Figure S 4. Both help to explain a larger LWP enhancement

6
in these regions: The Nd -LWP relationship is known to be nonlinear, with an increase in
LWP in the low-Nd regime and a decrease in the high-Nd regime 16 . The LWP-increase is
due to suppression of precipitation, but for LWP to increase, clouds also need to deepen,
because in adiabatic clouds LWP ∝ ∆Z 2 , with the cloud depth ∆Z 32 . However, cloud
deepening is only possible if the cloud is not topped by a strong inversion (see Fig. 5).

This means that the same unstable conditions, which could be responsible for tracks
being invisible (blurred), could also cause the LWP response to be more positive. The
large positive LWP responses in unstable conditions can be seen as a generalization of the
findings of Christensen and Stephens 20 : The authors observe LWP increases and cloud
deepening for ship tracks in open cell Sc, while there was a small negative LWP response
in closed cells. This matches modelling results of ‘optimal concentrations’ of aerosol, with
a higher value (i.e. more aerosol-limited clouds) in unstable conditions 33 . Similarly, a
positive LWP response and cloud deepening has been reported for shallow cumulus clouds
in models 34 .

These findings make it seem plausible that ship track studies which have focused ex-
clusively on the high-Nd , high inversion strength regions have missed the large sensitivity
of clouds to aerosols in low-Nd , low inversion strength regions.

Figure 3: Comparison of in-track and out-of-track properties in four regions: the Chilean
and Namibian Sc, as well as the Cu around the Azores and Cabo Verde. The regions
are shown in colours together with the ship track data of around ten days. The other
plots show relative Nd , LWP and albedo anomalies.

7
a) b)

Figure 4: Heatmap of relative a) Nd and b) LWP anomaly, i.e. mean of in-track properties
divided by out-of-track properties.

Figure 5: Previous ship track studies focused on regions with stable conditions and rela-
tively high background Nd (left). There, cloud depth cannot increase because of the
strong inversion topping the cloud. Invisible tracks occur more often in unstable, low
background Nd clouds (right). When more cloud condensation nuclei are provided
by a ship, these clouds can deepen and increase their LWP.

Implications for Radiative Forcing and Detectability

While LWP adjustments were previously shown to contribute a small but likely positive
forcing 7,11 , our results indicate potential for a substantial negative forcing. Following Bel-
louin et al. 7 , and extrapolating to the rest of the globe (see Methods), we estimate the
forcing from LWP adjustment (and its 90% confidence intervals) to be -0.70 (-1.23, -0.19)
W m-2 . This is of opposite sign and higher magnitude than the estimate of 0.2 ± 0.2
W m-2 given in the latest IPCC report 3 (section 7.3.3.2.1).

Our approach also demonstrates a viable technique to monitor experiments of marine

cloud brightening (MCB), the targeted emission of aerosols into ocean clouds to increase
reflectivity and thereby mask global warming. Seidel et al. 35 , and more recently Diamond
et al. 27 have argued that the effect of MCB would only be detectable with remote sensing
on a regional scale after several years of emissions. However, knowing the positions of
emissions allows detection of their effects with as little as one month of observations. Fig.
S 5 shows that both albedo and Nd anomalies can be confidently detected with 30 days of
data, or equivalently about 600 individual ships.

8
Discussion & Conclusion

We have been able to show that the effect of ship emissions can be directly detected even
if they do not form visible ship tracks, in agreement with simulation results 24 . These
‘invisible’ ship tracks have markedly different properties, in particular a positive LWP
response even in likely non-precipitating clouds. Similarly, the trade wind regions not
previously studied for ship tracks show the strongest positive LWP response. Together
this shows that previous studies of ship tracks have been subject to a strong sampling bias.
Relying on visually identifiable ship tracks confines the analysis to specific meteorological
conditions and small geographical regions where visible ship tracks occur. We hypothesize
that the strong inversion found in these regions in particular limits LWP enhancement,
because clouds cannot deepen here. At the same time, the strong inversion could be
necessary to form tracks that are clearly visible, rather than blurred or diffuse. This con-
tradicts the assumption that findings from visible tracks generalise to other conditions
and regions 10,11,30 . It also links to the importance of accurate descriptions of shallow con-
vection, not now represented in global climate models. Nevertheless, our measurements
agree more closely with the models than with previous observations. Our results imply a
significantly larger climate cooling from LWP adjustments than previously reported.

Our method may suffer from imperfect collocation of emissions and satellite retrievals,
leading to some in-track and out-of-track properties actually belonging to the other cate-
gory. This effect is stronger at longer times since emission, as the advection of emissions
becomes more uncertain with time. However, all results are presented as departures from
the ground state. This means that in a hypothetical situation of large collocation errors,
we would expect no anomalies. In other words, the presented results can be seen as lower
bounds on the effect of shipping emissions on clouds.

Retrieval uncertainties in the non-Sc regimes also need to be considered: LWP retrievals in
the broken cloud scenes of the trade wind Cu are much more uncertain than in Sc decks 36 .
Biomass burning smoke and Sahara dust can interfere with retrievals in some parts of
the Atlantic. However, in-track and background will be equally affected by retrieval er-
rors. Therefore we do not expect the results to be significantly impacted by retrieval errors.

Splitting the data in the traditional ship track regions into days with visible tracks and
days without highlights how taking into account only the former can lead to a bias even
within a region. This is only a first approximation to the differences between individual
visible and invisible tracks, and may introduce a degree of subjectivity. However, for a
consistent estimate of sensitivities and ultimately radiative forcing, all tracks need to be
taken into account, and the distinction between visible and invisible tracks becomes irrel-
evant.

Future work will focus on using our method on global data for an estimate of LWP ad-

9
justment that takes into account spatial covariablility of sensitivity and cloud fraction.
Another avenue for further research is the automatic detection of visible tracks to refine
the comparison of visible and invisible ship tracks.

Although aspects of the radiative forcing due to aerosol-cloud interactions remain un-
certain, this work is a significant step towards observational constraints accross all cloud
regimes. In particular, it highlights the importance of using lines of evidence that are
representative of how cloud regimes, and with them aerosol sensitivities, change across
regions and with meteorological conditions.

Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation
programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 860100 (iMIRACLI). We
thank Jutta-Pekka Jalkanen for providing the ship emissions data sets. Thank you to Ed
Gryspeerdt for helpful discussions on interpreting the large LWP response. Thank you to
Jakob Runge for helpful comments on causality and instrumental variables.

Data availability
ERA-5 data is freely available from https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/. MODIS data is
freely available from https://ladsweb.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/search/. Emission datasets
were obtained from Jutta-Pekka Jalkanen (Jukka-Pekka.Jalkanen@fmi.fi). The complete
collocated data for ship tracks studied here is available on request from the authors, but
will be published on acceptance.

Methods
Scope Geographically, this study considers the larger part of the Atlantic between (-
50◦ S, 50◦ N) and (-90◦ W, 20◦ E) as well as the stratocumulus (Sc) deck in the Southeast
Pacific off the Chilean coast. The size of the region is limited by computational cost and
we choose to place it so it would cover two Sc regions. Our data is for the year 2019
and, in the case of the Chilean Sc region of (-35◦ S, 0◦ N) by (-90◦ W, -70◦ W), additionally
for 2018. In Fig. 3, we choose windows of (-30◦ S, -17◦ S) by (-82.5◦ W, -72.5◦ W) for the
Chilean Sc, (30◦ N, 50◦ N) by (-40◦ W, -10◦ W) for the Azores Cu, (10◦ N, 30◦ N) by (-50◦ W,
-20◦ W) for the Cabo Verde Cu, and (-30◦ S, -10◦ S) by (-10◦ W, 15◦ E) for the Namibian Sc.
The Sc positions are chosen for highest cloud fraction, while the Cu regions are chosen for
overlap with (future) in-situ measurement campaigns in the North Atlantic such as the
ACRUISE field campaign.

Datasets Ship emissions were calculated by Jutta-Pekka Jalkanen using the model of
Jalkanen et al. 37 from automatic identification system (AIS) data. This data, which

10
contains SOx emissions, is at hourly and 0.05◦ resolution (0.01◦ for the Chilean Sc in
2018). The resolution is limited by the studied area, however the change from 0.01 to 0.05◦
does not affect results as further steps of the pipeline have higher spatial uncertainty. To
transport the emissions, the HYSPLIT advection scheme (see below) uses ERA5 reanalysis
data of wind speeds at a 3-hourly and 0.25◦ resolution 38 . Satellite retrievals of cloud
properties (reff , optical depth, LWP) are from the Level-2 cloud product MOD 06 of the
Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Aqua/Terra satellites 39 ,
collection 6.1. Only properties of liquid clouds are used, as given by the MODIS cloud
property mask. Nd is calculated following Quaas et al. 40 from effective radius retrievals
and cloud optical thickness (see also the derivation to eq. 11 in Grosvenor et al. 41 ).
Albedo is calculated like in Segrin et al. 29 from cloud optical thickness.

Advection Ship positions are detected using the trackpy library 42 . The HYSPLIT
model 43 advects these positions for 24h, using ERA5 winds. Each satellite retrieval is
then collocated with the emissions that occurred in the 24h before the retrieval, advected
to the positions at retrieval time. As the emissions data time resolution is only hourly, it
is interpolated to a 5 min period in order to not miss parts of the track.

Counterfactuals We need to compare the polluted clouds to the counterfactual situa-

tion in which they would not have been polluted. As ship emissions are strongly localised,
we can assume that the region a small distance away will not have been polluted and
can be used as a proxy for the counterfactual. Choosing the distance from the pollution
source at which the counterfactual is retrieved is a trade-off: the closer, the more similar
the retrieved cloud is to the counterfactual, but it also risks being influenced by pollution.
This is particularly true when the collocation is more uncertain, i.e. at later times since
emission. In this study, cloud properties within a 10km radius around the pollution are
retrieved for the in-track properties. Out-of-track properties are retrieved at a 30km dis-
tance, also with a 10km radius. Out-of track properties are always retrieved on both sides
of the track and averaged.

Calculation of relative anomalies The retrieved cloud properties often follow skewed
distributions with strictly positive values and heavy tails at high values. This is exac-
erbated when taking ratio distributions. For example, the distribution of in-track-LWP
divided by out-of-track-LWP has the surprising property of having a mean larger than
one, while the ratio distribution of the out-of-track-LWP divided by in-track-LWP also
has a mean larger than one. This wrongly seems to indicate that average in-track-LWP
is simultaneously larger and smaller than average out-of-track-LWP. It is however an ar-
tifact, resulting from the fact that the operations of taking the mean and taking the ratio
of distributions do not commute (cf. Jensen’s inequality). To avoid misleading results,
relative anomalies (for Nd , LWP, albedo) are reported as ratios of means, rather than as
means of ratios. Means are either taken over time-windows as in Fig. 2, over regions as in
Fig. 4, or over all of the data as in the forcing calculation.

11
 EIS bounds [K] βL (EIS) ±
-10.0 to -2.5 0.74 0.04
-2.5 to 5.0 0.59 0.01
5.0 to 12.5 0.12 0.01
12.5 to 20.0 -0.46 0.02

Table 1: Sensitivity values βL obtained for different bins of EIS, as well as uncertainties.

Radiative Forcing From the responses in Nd and LWP, we estimate the sensitivity

d ln LW P
βL = . (1)
d ln Nd

This is done separating the ship track observations by EIS into four bins, following the ar-
gument discussed above about the dependence of sensitivities to inversion strength. This
allows for an extrapolation to unobserved regions, in order to approximate the global
radiative forcing. Bins, sensitivity values and uncertainties are given in Table 1. Follow-
ing the calculation of Bellouin et al. 7 , the sensitivity can be used to estimate the rapid
adjustment of LWP to aerosol

RALW P = ∆ ln Nd βL SL cL (2)

where ∆ ln Nd is the fractional anthropogenic change in droplet number, SL is the sen-

sitivity of top-of-atmosphere radiation to LWP, and cL is the effective cloud fraction for
rapid adjustments in LWP. cL is calculated according to

hCL βL RSW i
cL = , (3)
hβL ihRSW i

with the liquid cloud fraction CL , downwelling shortwave radiation RSW , and regional
averaging indicated by angular brackets. CL is obtained from MODIS between 2010 and
2019. This approach takes into account the spatial covariability of cloud fraction, LWP-
sensitivity, and radiation. A confidence range for βL and CL is obtained via bootstrapping.
∆ ln Nd and SL values are taken from Bellouin et al. 7 . Combining the confidence ranges
with the Monte Carlo method from Bellouin et al. 7 gives the medians and 16-84% con-
fidence ranges reported. Different choices in the sensitivity extrapolation like excluding
land, polar regions, and increasing the number of EIS bins led to relative changes of <5%.
A plot of the estimated radiative forcing from LWP adjustments is given in Fig. S 6. In
agreement with Gryspeerdt et al. 16 , the Sc regions (where ship tracks have been studied
previously) are the ones with the most positive radiative forcing, while almost all other
regions show a negative forcing, linked to positive LWP sensitivities. While exact way of
weighting calculated sensitivities seems to have only a small effect, the selection of data
from which to calculate sensitivities in the first place is important for the resulting ra-
diative forcing. Table 1 presents the sensitivities obtained from the entirety of the data.
However, as is apparent e.g. in Fig. 3, the Nd anomaly is strongly time dependent, with

12
a maximum around three hours after emission. Therefore, calculating βL using only the
first hours of data would result in lower sensitivities. For example 12 (6)h of data yield
radiative forcings of -0.61 (-0.46) W m-2 .

13
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Supplementary Information

Figure S 1: LWP response for likely precipitating clouds (reff > 15) for the Chilean Sc in
2018 as in Fig. 2, comparison of visible and invisible tracks. The data is filtered
excluding the highest and lowest 5% of the data sets to smoothen the lines. In the
precipitating case, LWP response is positive in both cases, but more pronounced in
the invisible tracks.

19
 (a) Chilean Sc 2019

(b) Namibian Sc 2019

Figure S 2: Additional comparisons of visible and invisible tracks in Sc decks, similar to

Fig. 2, but for 2019 and including the Namibian Sc deck.

Figure S 3: Meteorological conditions of days that show any ship tracks and no ship
tracks for the two Sc regions in 2019 and for the Chilean Sc in 2018. Plotted are
density histograms in arbitrary units. Data is from ERA-5, evaluated at the advected
shipping emission locations.

20
a) b)

Figure S 4: Heatmap of inversion strength and background droplet number. Data is from
ERA-5 for EIS, evaluated at the advected shipping emission locations. The Nd data
is from the MODIS retrieval to the sides of the emission locations.

Figure S 5: Fraction of significant anomalies for albedo and Nd as a function of the number
of days sampled from. This is for the Chilean Sc described above. For a fixed number
of days, the data is sampled 500 times and anomalies are calculated. Anomalies are
taken to be significant if they are larger than three standard errors, equivalent to a
Student’s t-test at p=0.005

Figure S 6: Estimated radiative forcing from the adjustment of LWP to anthropogenic Nd

changes. Liquid cloud fractions from MODIS 2010-2019 are multiplied with LWP
sensitivities calculated from ship track observations, extrapolated globally according
to EIS, as well as the downwelling shortwave radiation from ERA-5 and the estimate
for anthropogenic Nd changes from Bellouin et al. 7 .

21