How to Use albedo in a Sentence

albedo

noun
  • The lack of snow cover decreases what’s known as the albedo effect, or the extent to which a surface is capable of reflecting sunlight, and therefore heat, back to space.
    Tatiana Schlossberg, Outside Online, 25 Mar. 2023
  • His best guess is that sea ice, or rather the lack of it, played a big role, thanks to something called the albedo effect.
    Kendall Powell, Discover Magazine, 26 Feb. 2015
  • But when the ice melts, dark water with a low albedo is exposed.
    Tom Yulsman, Discover Magazine, 22 Feb. 2014
  • The more reflective a surface is, the higher the surface’s albedo.
    Isabella Fertel, USA TODAY, 30 May 2023
  • On the other hand, if dry air from above the cloud mixes in (entrainment), the cloud may produce rain and have a lower albedo.
    Kate Murphy, IEEE Spectrum, 7 Sep. 2021
  • The researchers found no correlation, which means that changes in Earth’s albedo is caused by something on the Earth.
    Jamie Carter, Forbes, 6 Dec. 2021
  • The albedo of Venus is close to .7, meaning its thick cloud covering reflects about 70% of the light striking it back into space.
    Kristen Rogers, CNN, 27 Feb. 2020
  • Permafrost and loss of albedo are the only two feedbacks with cost estimates at this point.
    Stephen Leahy, National Geographic, 23 Apr. 2019
  • Red snow means lower albedo, which means more absorbed sunlight and faster snowmelt.
    Kylie Mohr, WIRED, 10 Dec. 2022
  • The idea is that the coating changes the amount of sunlight the asteroid reflects, its albedo, creating a thrust that redirects it.
    The Physics Arxiv Blog, Discover Magazine, 10 Dec. 2021
  • The scientists used the device to record the snow’s albedo, a measure of what fraction of the sunlight beaming down is reflected back up.
    Kylie Mohr, WIRED, 10 Dec. 2022
  • Less sea ice coverage also means that less sunlight will be reflected off the surface of the ocean in a process known as the albedo effect.
    Washington Post, 27 July 2017
  • The albedo effect is particularly acute in the summer, when the Arctic is bathed in 24 hours of sunlight.
    Matt Simon, Wired, 7 Apr. 2021
  • Normally, bright white snow has a very high albedo, meaning much of the sunlight that hits the surface gets reflected away.
    Margaret Osborne, Smithsonian Magazine, 5 Jan. 2023
  • The second example shows a layered view, using the albedo and a shaded render.
    Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 21 Feb. 2023
  • Anthropogenic warming causes snow and ice caps to melt, which can make Earth’s albedo decrease.
    Maddie Bender, Scientific American, 18 June 2021
  • But could that light curve have instead been produced by a more rounded object with a nonuniform albedo?
    Scientific American, 26 Jan. 2021
  • This makes the reflectiveness, or albedo, different from the regions around it.
    Cyrus Farivar, WIRED, 5 June 2007
  • With an average albedo of 4.4 percent, Bennu is one of the darkest objects in the Solar System.
    Eric Berger, Ars Technica, 20 Mar. 2020
  • The unknown absorbers seem to play a role in this process by affecting the planet’s albedo, or how much energy is reflected back to space.
    Erica Naone, Discover Magazine, 29 Aug. 2019
  • Further complicating these feedback loops, more shrubs in turn make for a warmer Arctic thanks to the decreasing reflectance of the landscape, or its albedo.
    Matt Simon, Wired, 7 Apr. 2021
  • To boil the albedo effect down to its most basic form, brighter colors reflect heat away from the Earth, whereas darker ones absorb them and contribute to warming.
    Erik Millar, Forbes, 25 July 2022
  • In summer, owing to the albedo effect—light surfaces reflect heat, dark ones absorb it—the pale grass would stay cooler than the brown shrubs that currently blanket the tundra.
    Joshua Yaffa, The New Yorker, 10 Jan. 2022
  • This amount of carbon didn’t have much of an impact on the ice sheet’s overall albedo, or reflectivity, Stohl and Evangeliou said.
    Megan Gannon, Scientific American, 14 Apr. 2018
  • There is a connection between climate change and albedo: snow and ice, for instance, have a high albedo, reflecting up to 90 percent of the sunlight that hits them back to outer space.
    Maddie Bender, Scientific American, 18 June 2021
  • That is a concern for a variety of reasons: a loss of habitat for Arctic creatures and a decline in the albedo effect, which is when ice reflects sunlight back into space.
    Scott Dance, Anchorage Daily News, 15 Mar. 2023
  • The camera also maintains albedo, displacement, and normal map that are render-ready.
    Valentina Palladino, Ars Technica, 8 Jan. 2018
  • Less sea ice means the planet's reflectivity (what scientists call albedo) declines and our planet absorbs more heat from the sun.
    David Freeman, NBC News, 9 May 2017
  • Second is albedo, or the reflectivity of the object's surface.
    Erik Klemetti, Discover Magazine, 28 June 2021
  • Eventually, Hooks found some Russian materials from the 1920s that, in pure mathematics, described the albedo of the Moon.
    Eric Berger, Ars Technica, 19 July 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'albedo.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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