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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.
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 ...
A stable marine layer may then develop over the ocean as a result. As this layer moves over progressively warmer waters, however, turbulence within the marine layer can gradually lift the inversion layer to higher altitudes, and eventually even pierce it, producing thunderstorms, and under the right circumstances, tropical cyclones .
The Earth's atmosphere is the origin of the weather phenomena studied in meteorology. Atmospheric composition, temperature, and pressure vary across a series of distinct sublayers including the troposphere and stratosphere. The properties of Earth's atmosphere vary by altitude across a series of distinct layers. atmospheric boundary layer (ABL)
An elevated inversion layer is thus a region of warm air above a region of cold air, but higher in the atmosphere (generally not touching the surface). A capping inversion occurs when there is a boundary layer with a normal temperature profile (warm air rising into cooler air) and the layer above that is an inversion layer (cooler air below ...
The atmospheric circulation can be viewed as a heat engine driven by the Sun's energy and whose energy sink, ultimately, is the blackness of space. The work produced by that engine causes the motion of the masses of air, and in that process it redistributes the energy absorbed by the Earth's surface near the tropics to the latitudes nearer the ...
For residents in the eastern Coachella Valley, a rural area in Riverside County, Calif., the rapid increase in extreme heat is causing farmworkers to become ill and even costing some their lives.
For the climate system, the term refers to a critical threshold at which global or regional climate changes from one stable state to another stable state.". [15] In ecosystems and in social systems, a tipping point can trigger a regime shift, a major systems reorganisation into a new stable state. [16] Such regime shifts need not be harmful.