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NASA Image: Ship Emissions Make Clouds Appear Brighter, Thicker

Narrow clouds, known as ship tracks, form when water vapor condenses around tiny particles of pollution that ships emit as exhaust or that form from gases in the exhaust. Image Credit: NASA/Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response.

Ships churning through the Atlantic Ocean produced this patchwork of bright, crisscrossing cloud trails off the coast of Portugal and Spain. The narrow clouds, known as ship tracks, form when water vapor condenses around tiny particles of pollution that ships emit as exhaust or that form from gases in the exhaust. Ship tracks typically form in areas where low-lying stratus and cumulus clouds are present.

Some of the pollution particles generated by ships (especially sulfates) are soluble in water and serve as the seeds around which cloud droplets form. Clouds infused with ship exhaust have more and smaller droplets than unpolluted clouds. As a result, the light hitting the polluted clouds scatters in many directions, making them appear brighter and thicker than unpolluted marine clouds, which are typically seeded by larger, naturally occurring particles such as sea salt.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image on January 16, 2018. Some of the crisscrossing clouds stretch hundreds of kilometers from end to end. The narrow ends of the clouds are youngest, while the broader, wavier ends are older.

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Left: Model domain of the Patagonian Shelf model (dashed black line) within the wider regional context. Water depth is shown using a blue color scale, displaying only depths shallower than 500 m. Middle: Present-day bathymetry of the Patagonian Shelf with 500 m (dotted white line) and 1,000 m (solid white line) depth contours. Orange triangles mark the coastal tide gauges used for model validation (outlined triangles: Moreira et al. (2011); filled triangles: Piccioni et al. (2019)). Numbers 1–8 indicate sites where relative sea-level curves and Mean High Water Spring Tide (MHWST) time series were extracted. Place names referred to in the text are: (FI/IM) Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas; (RPE) Río de la Plata Estuary; (SMG) San Matías Gulf; (MS) Magellan Straits; (BG) Bahía Grande; and (TF) Tierra del Fuego. Right, green bounding box: Comparison of model grid resolutions. The global ocean model uses a coarser regular grid (gray land cells and white water cells), while the regional tidal model uses a higher-resolution unstructured triangular mesh (gray triangles). The present-day coastline is shown in black.

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ECO 2026 Issue II
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issue II

By translating complex ocean data into actionable strategies, the applied marine science community plays a pivotal role in ensuring the long-term resilience of coastal environments while bolstering the global Blue Economy.

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Offshore energy, policy changes, and ocean observation.

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