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The temperature profile of the atmosphere is a result of the interaction between radiative heating from sunlight, cooling to space via thermal radiation, and upward heat transport via natural convection (which carries hot air and latent heat upward). Above the tropopause, convection does not occur and all cooling is radiative.
A thermocline (also known as the thermal layer or the metalimnion in lakes) is a distinct layer based on temperature within a large body of fluid (e.g. water, as in an ocean or lake; or air, e.g. an atmosphere) with a high gradient of distinct temperature differences associated with depth.
Thus, indirectly, thermal velocity is a measure of temperature. Technically speaking, it is a measure of the width of the peak in the Maxwell–Boltzmann particle velocity distribution. Note that in the strictest sense thermal velocity is not a velocity, since velocity usually describes a vector rather than simply a scalar speed.
In aviation, hot and high is a condition of low air density due to high ambient temperature and high airport elevation. Air density decreases with increasing temperature and altitude. The lower air density reduces the power output from an aircraft's engine and also requires a higher true airspeed before the aircraft can become airborne.
So cool air lying on top of warm air can be stable, as long as the temperature decrease with height is less than the adiabatic lapse rate; the dynamically important quantity is not the temperature, but the potential temperature—the temperature the air would have if it were brought adiabatically to a reference pressure. The air around the ...
When stated in terms of temperature differences, Newton's law (with several further simplifying assumptions, such as a low Biot number and a temperature-independent heat capacity) results in a simple differential equation expressing temperature-difference as a function of time. The solution to that equation describes an exponential decrease of ...
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 ...
In a completely moist troposphere, a temperature decrease with height less than 6 °C (11 °F) per kilometer ascent indicates stability, while greater changes indicate instability. In the range between 6 °C (11 °F) and 9.8 °C (17.6 °F) temperature decrease per kilometer ascent, the term conditionally unstable is used.