Stratiform clouds mostly originate over the oceans and have a profound impact on the Earth's radiation budget. Therefore, understanding the causes of the variability in their radiative effects is necessary for a better comprehension of the Earth's energy budget and climate forecast. The future effort to reduce the impact of greenhouse gases and their associated global warming potential puts the emphasis on natural sources (Boucher et al., 2013;Satheesh & Moorthy, 2005) and processes controlling marine stratiform clouds.The radiative impact and brightness of clouds strongly depend on their microphysical properties (Falkowski et al., 1992) such as liquid water content (LWC), cloud droplet effective radius (R eff ), and cloud droplet number concentration (CDNC). At constant LWC, the increase of aerosol number and cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) atmospheric concentrations results in higher CDNC while the R eff diminishes. Therefore, clouds are optically brighter as more solar radiation is scattered upward and less is transmitted through. This is known as the first