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The troposphere is the lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere. It extends from Earth's surface to an average height of about 12 km (7.5 mi; 39,000 ft), although this altitude varies from about 9 km (5.6 mi; 30,000 ft) at the geographic poles to 17 km (11 mi; 56,000 ft) at the Equator, [22] with some variation due
Measurements of outgoing longwave radiation at the top of the atmosphere and of longwave radiation back towards the surface are important to understand how much energy is retained in Earth's climate system: for example, how thermal radiation cools and warms the surface, and how this energy is distributed to affect the development of clouds.
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).
The communications blackouts that affect spacecraft re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, which are also known as radio blackouts, ionization blackouts, or reentry blackouts, are caused by an envelope of ionized air around the craft, created by the heat from the compression of the atmosphere by the craft. The ionized air interferes with radio ...
The atmosphere is one of the Earth's major carbon reservoirs and holds approximately 720 gigatons of carbon as of year 2000. [2] The concentration of mostly carbon-based greenhouse gases has increased dramatically since the onset of the industrial era. This makes an understanding of the carbon component of the atmosphere highly important.
Ward and Brownlee predict that there will be two variations of the future warming feedback: the "moist greenhouse" in which water vapor dominates the troposphere and starts to accumulate in the stratosphere and the "runaway greenhouse" in which water vapor becomes a dominant component of the atmosphere such that the Earth starts to undergo ...
One classical thermal escape mechanism is Jeans escape, [1] named after British astronomer Sir James Jeans, who first described this process of atmospheric loss. [2] In a quantity of gas, the average velocity of any one molecule is measured by the gas's temperature, but the velocities of individual molecules change as they collide with one another, gaining and losing kinetic energy.
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 ...