An increase in the planetary albedo of the earth-atmosphere system by only 10% can decrease the equilibrium surface temperature to that of the last ice age. Nevertheless, albedo biases of 10% or greater would be introduced into large regions of current climate models if clouds were given their observed liquid water amounts, because of the treatment of clouds as plane parallel. Past work has addressed the effect of cloud shape on albedo; here the focus is on the within-cloud variability of the vertically integrated liquid water. The main result is an estimate of the “plane-parallel albedo bias” using the “independent pixel approximation,” which ignores net horizontal photon transport, from a simple fractal model of marine stratocumulus clouds that ignores the cloud shape. The use of the independent pixel approximation in this context will be justified in a separate Monte Carlo study. The focus on marine stratocumulus clouds is due to their important role in cloud radiative forcing and also that, o... Abstract An increase in the planetary albedo of the earth-atmosphere system by only 10% can decrease the equilibrium surface temperature to that of the last ice age. Nevertheless, albedo biases of 10% or greater would be introduced into large regions of current climate models if clouds were given their observed liquid water amounts, because of the treatment of clouds as plane parallel. Past work has addressed the effect of cloud shape on albedo; here the focus is on the within-cloud variability of the vertically integrated liquid water. The main result is an estimate of the “plane-parallel albedo bias” using the “independent pixel approximation,” which ignores net horizontal photon transport, from a simple fractal model of marine stratocumulus clouds that ignores the cloud shape. The use of the independent pixel approximation in this context will be justified in a separate Monte Carlo study. The focus on marine stratocumulus clouds is due to their important role in cloud radiative forcing and also that, o...