The sun reflecting off snow(Skyer Ewing / Unsplash)Here’s a quiz: What’s albedo?The weather devotees in our midst may know.So, what is albedo and how do meteorologists use it in forecasts? Find out with this edition of Science Behind the Forecast.This transcript was edited for clarity and brev ity.Bill Burton: It's time for us to take a look at the Science Behind the Forecast as I am joined by WAVE 3 meteorologist Tawana Andrew. Good morning. Tawana. What are we learning about today?Tawana Andrew: Good morning. Albedo. And I want to make sure I specify that it is albedo. Not libido. Albedo.BB: Albedo. Kind of like somebody we went to high school with. A guy named Al Bedo.TA: Exactly. The National Weather Service defines albedo as the fraction of radiation striking a surface that is reflected by that surface.BB: Oh, sure, that makes perfect sense.TA: Or in English, it is the amount of light that a surface reflects relative to the total amount of sunlight hitting it.BB: Now that I can understand.TA: We're talking about visible light when we talk about albedo, as meteorologists. But sometimes it may involve infrared radiation. Think heat. We'll get to that in a second. Albedo is a unitless value that ranges on a scale from zero to one. A value of one means that an object or surface reflects all of the incoming solar radiation, and a surface that absorbs all of the sunlight would have an albedo of zero.For example, snow reflects a lot of light, so we'll have a higher albedo, closer to one. For black asphalt, it has a low albedo because it absorbs so much of that sunlight. In turn, you can tell that it's doing that because it gets so hot so quickly, and that is where that infrared radiation comes into play. Overall, our entire planet, on average, reflects about 30% of the sun's energy. Our planet has an average albedo of .30.Of course, we have to say on average, because you have clouds that are reflecting more of that light in a darker land that is absorbing a lot more of that light. That all plays into how our weather happens across the globe. Even aerosols in our atmosphere can affect albedo over a particular location.Think back to a few years, when we had all of that Saharan dust going from Africa across the Atlantic and straight towards us, the sky looked a little bit hazy because it was reflecting more of that light back into the atmosphere, and that, in turn, actually affected our high temperatures on the days that we had to deal with that.BB: Because the albedo was then different.TA: Albedo is super valuable for our day to day forecast.Let's say, for example, we have a lot of snow that falls one day. Snow will reflect more light, especially fresh snow, which can help keep our air temperatures lower, because all of that heat is being pushed back up into our atmosphere. Let's look at Louisville. Louisville has a lot of black asphalt. Has a lot of concrete that absorbs much more sunlight, which warms very quickly. As meteorologists, we know that on average, the city is going to be much warmer than places, let's say towards maybe Elizabethtown or maybe towards Corydon, just depending on where you are in this particular area, just the amount of concrete and asphalt and that albedo can play a role in our high temperatures, or even our low temperatures at night too. ...read more read less