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Atmospheric instability is a condition where the Earth's atmosphere is considered to be unstable and as a result local weather is highly variable through distance and time. [ clarification needed ] [ 1 ] Atmospheric instability encourages vertical motion, which is directly correlated to different types of weather systems and their severity.
Atmospheric thermodynamics is the study of heat-to-work transformations (and their reverse) that take place in the Earth's atmosphere and manifest as weather or climate. . Atmospheric thermodynamics use the laws of classical thermodynamics, to describe and explain such phenomena as the properties of moist air, the formation of clouds, atmospheric convection, boundary layer meteorology, and ...
A stable atmosphere makes vertical movement difficult, and small vertical disturbances dampen out and disappear. In an unstable atmosphere, vertical air movements (such as in orographic lifting , where an air mass is displaced upwards as it is blown by wind up the rising slope of a mountain range) tend to become larger, resulting in turbulent ...
Atmospheric stability occurring at night with radiative cooling tends to vertically constrain turbulent eddies, thus increasing the wind gradient. [8] The magnitude of the wind gradient is largely influenced by the weather , principally atmospheric stability and the height of any convective boundary layer or capping inversion .
Any atmospheric circulation system, whether it is a small-scale weather system or a large-scale zonal wind system, is maintained by the supply of kinetic energy.The development of such a system requires either a transformation of some other form of energy into kinetic energy, or the conversion of the kinetic energy of another system into that of the developing system. [3]
The process is commonly called the Chapman cycle by atmospheric scientists. Most of the ozone production occurs in the tropical upper stratosphere and mesosphere. The total mass of ozone produced per day over the globe is about 400 million metric tons.
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As another example, diamond is a stable phase only at very high pressures, but is a metastable form of carbon at standard temperature and pressure. It can be converted to graphite (plus leftover kinetic energy), but only after overcoming an activation energy – an intervening hill.