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A marine layer is an air mass that develops over the surface of a large body of water, such as an ocean or large lake, in the presence of a temperature inversion. The inversion itself is usually initiated by the cooling effect caused when cold water on the surface of the ocean interacts with a comparatively warm air mass. [1]
An inversion is also produced whenever radiation from the surface of the earth exceeds the amount of radiation received from the sun, which commonly occurs at night, or during the winter when the sun is very low in the sky. This effect is virtually confined to land regions as the ocean retains heat far longer.
The reddish color of the Sun when it is observed through a thick atmosphere, as during a sunrise or sunset. This is because long-wavelength (red) light is scattered less than blue light. The red light reaches the observer's eye, whereas the blue light is scattered out of the line of sight. Other colours in the sky, such as glowing skies at dusk ...
Clouds are effective at absorbing and scattering longwave radiation, and therefore reduce the amount of outgoing longwave radiation. Clouds have both cooling and warming effects. They have a cooling effect insofar as they reflect sunlight (as measured by cloud albedo), and a warming effect, insofar as they absorb longwave radiation. For low ...
the cloud IR emissivity, with values between 0 and 1, with a global average around 0.7; the effective cloud amount, the cloud amount weighted by the cloud IR emissivity, with a global average of 0.5; the cloud (visible) optical depth varies within a range of 4 and 10. the cloud water path for the liquid and solid (ice) phases of the cloud particles
The Earth's weather is a consequence of its illumination by the Sun and the laws of thermodynamics. 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 ...
At night, the absence of clouds means that outgoing longwave radiation (i.e. heat energy from the surface) is not absorbed, giving cooler diurnal low temperatures in all seasons. When surface winds become light, the subsidence produced directly under a high-pressure system can lead to a buildup of particulates in urban areas under the ridge ...
Noctilucent clouds (NLCs), or night shining clouds, [1] are tenuous cloud-like phenomena in the upper atmosphere of Earth. When viewed from space, they are called polar mesospheric clouds (PMCs) , detectable as a diffuse scattering layer of water ice crystals near the summer polar mesopause .