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A climate normal is defined as the arithmetic average of a climate element (e.g. temperature) over a 30-year period. A 30-year period is used as it is long enough to filter out any interannual variation or anomalies such as El Niño–Southern Oscillation, but also short enough to be able to show longer climatic trends." [12]
Factors that can shape climate are called climate forcings or "forcing mechanisms". [9] These include processes such as variations in solar radiation , variations in the Earth's orbit, variations in the albedo or reflectivity of the continents, atmosphere, and oceans, mountain-building and continental drift and changes in greenhouse gas ...
Trewartha's modifications to the 1899 Köppen climate system sought to reclass the middle latitudes into three groups: C (subtropical)—8 or more months have a mean temperature of 10 °C (50 °F) or higher; D temperate—4 to 7 months have a mean temperature of 10 °C or higher; and E boreal climate—1 to 3 months have a mean temperature of ...
The Köppen climate classification divides Earth climates into five main climate groups, with each group being divided based on patterns of seasonal precipitation and temperature. The five main groups are A (tropical), B (arid), C (temperate), D (continental), and E (polar).
The five components of the climate system all interact. They are the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere. [1]: 1451 Earth's climate system is a complex system with five interacting components: the atmosphere (air), the hydrosphere (water), the cryosphere (ice and permafrost), the lithosphere (earth's upper rocky layer) and the biosphere (living things).
Various factors affect the average state of the atmosphere at a particular location. For instance, midlatitudes will have a pronounced seasonal cycle of temperature whereas tropical regions show little variation of temperature over a year. [20] Another major variable of climate is continentality: the distance to major water bodies such as oceans.
This is why the temperature change is defined in terms of a 20-year average, which reduces the noise of hot and cold years and decadal climate patterns, and detects the long-term signal. [ 63 ] : 5 [ 64 ]
Climate sensitivity is a key measure in climate science and describes how much Earth's surface will warm for a doubling in the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2) concentration. [1] [2] Its formal definition is: "The change in the surface temperature in response to a change in the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2) concentration or other radiative ...