Aerosols stimulate the vertical development of clouds containing liquid water and ice, reports a study published online this week in Nature Geoscience.

Zhanqing Li and colleagues use ten years of extensive ground-based data collected over the southern Great Plains of North America to show that aerosols stimulate the upward growth of warm-based clouds containing both water and ice. They also show that deep, water-laden clouds are associated with more frequent rainfall events.