Cloud cover and albedo

Cloud cover (also known as cloudiness, cloudage or cloud amount) refers to the fraction of the sky obscured by clouds when observed from a particular location.

Effects of Cloud Cover

During the day, the earth is heated by the sun. If skies are clear, more heat reaches the earth's surface (as in the diagram below). This leads to warmer temperatures.

 However, if skies are cloudy, some of the sun's rays are reflected off the cloud droplets back into space. Therefore, less of the sun's energy is able to reach the earth's surface, which causes the earth to heat up more slowly. This leads to cooler temperatures.

 At night cloud cover has the opposite effect. If skies are clear, heat emitted from the earth's surface freely escapes into space, resulting in colder temperature

 However, if clouds are present, some of the heat emitted from the earth's surface is trapped by the clouds and reemitted back towards the earth. As a result, temperatures decrease more slowly than if the skies were clear.

Role in the climate system

Clouds play multiple critical roles in the climate system. In particular, being bright objects in the visible part of the solar spectrum, they efficiently reflect light to space and thus contribute to the cooling of the planet. A small increase in cloud cover could, in principle, balance the heating resulting from greenhouse gases (though this may have other implications as well).

Albedo
The term albedo (Latin for white) is commonly used to applied to the overall average reflection coefficient of an object. For example, the albedo of the Earth is 0.39 (Kaufmann) and this affects the equilibrium temperature of the Earth. The greenhouse effect, by trapping infrared radiation, can lower the albedo of the earth and cause global warming.

World distribution

References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_cover

http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/%28Gh%2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo http://www.eoearth.org/article/Albedo

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/HBA