Goutam Choudhury, Tom Goren, Matthias Tesche
Abstract The susceptibility of cloud droplet number concentration to aerosols remains challenging to constrain in satellite observations. This difficulty arises from limitations in representing cloud condensation nuclei, which depend on aerosol size and composition. To address this, we combine aerosol‐type‐specific retrievals of dry extinction coefficient and number concentration from Cloud–Aerosol LiDAR and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation with co‐located from CloudSat and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer. We find that associated with mineral dust is consistently near zero across all aerosol‐ combinations. Furthermore, decreases nonlinearly as the dust fraction increases, with a pronounced reduction occurring only when dust exceeds approximately 70%. Accordingly, excluding dust from the analysis increases the globally aggregated from 0.24–0.26 to 0.30–0.37. These findings highlight the importance of considering aerosol composition when constraining aerosol–cloud interactions and their associated radiative forcing in satellite observations.