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The polar climate regions are characterized by a lack of warm summers but with varying winters. Every month a polar climate has an average temperature of less than 10 °C (50 °F). Regions with a polar climate cover more than 20% of the Earth's area.
Milankovitch cycles describe the collective effects of changes in the Earth's movements on its climate over thousands of years. The term was coined and named after the Serbian geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milanković .
Polar meteorology is the study of the atmosphere of Earth's polar regions. Surface temperature inversion is typical of polar environments and leads to the katabatic wind phenomenon. The vertical temperature structure of polar environments tends to be more complex than in mid-latitude or tropical climates.
500 million years of climate change Ice core data for the past 400,000 years, with the present at right. Note length of glacial cycles averages ~100,000 years. Blue curve is temperature, green curve is CO 2, and red curve is windblown glacial dust (loess). Scale: Millions of years before present, earlier dates approximate.
Climate modelling suggests that low solar activity may result in, for example, colder winters in the US and northern Europe and milder winters in Canada and southern Europe, with little change in global averages. [89] More broadly, links have been suggested between solar cycles, global climate and regional events such as El Niño. [90]
It was only in the 20th century that paleoclimatology became a unified scientific field. Before, different aspects of Earth's climate history were studied by a variety of disciplines. [5] At the end of the 20th century, the empirical research into Earth's ancient climates started to be combined with computer models of increasing complexity.
Orbital forcing is the effect on climate of slow changes in the tilt of the Earth's axis and shape of the Earth's orbit around the Sun (see Milankovitch cycles).These orbital changes modify the total amount of sunlight reaching the Earth by up to 25% at mid-latitudes (from 400 to 500 W/(m 2) at latitudes of 60 degrees).
The climate of Antarctica is the coldest on Earth. The continent is also extremely dry (it is a desert [ 1 ] ), averaging 166 mm (6.5 in) of precipitation per year. Snow rarely melts on most parts of the continent, and, after being compressed, becomes the glacier ice that makes up the ice sheet .
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