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A fog can be caused by a temperature inversion where cold air is pooled at the surface which helped to create the fog, while warmer air sits above it. The inverted boundary between cold air and warm air reflects sound waves back toward the ground, allowing sound that would normally radiate out escaping into the upper atmosphere to instead ...
Convective precipitation (showers, thundershowers, heavy rain and related unstable weather) is caused by air being lifted and condensing into clouds by the movement of the cold front or cold occlusion under a mass of warmer, moist air. If the temperature differences of the two air masses involved are large and the turbulence is extreme because ...
The Hadley cell is a closed circulation loop which begins at the equator. There, moist air is warmed by the Earth's surface, decreases in density and rises. A similar air mass rising on the other side of the equator forces those rising air masses to move poleward. The rising air creates a low pressure zone near the equator.
Since the saturation vapor pressure is proportional to temperature, cold air has a lower saturation point than warm air. The difference between these values is the basis for the formation of clouds. When saturated air cools, it can no longer contain the same amount of water vapor.
Usually, within the lower atmosphere (the troposphere) the air near the surface of the Earth is warmer than the air above it, largely because the atmosphere is heated from below as solar radiation warms the Earth's surface, which in turn then warms the layer of the atmosphere directly above it, e.g., by thermals (convective heat transfer). [3]
The lifted index (LI), usually expressed in kelvins, is the temperature difference between the temperature of the environment Te(p) and an air parcel lifted adiabatically Tp(p) at a given pressure height in the troposphere, usually 500 hPa . When the value is positive, the atmosphere (at the respective height) is stable and when the value is ...
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 ...
As the sun does not heat the Earth evenly, there is a temperature difference between the poles and the equator, creating air masses with more or less homogeneous temperature with latitude. Differences in atmospheric pressure are also at the origin of the general atmospheric circulation while the air masses are separated by ribbons where ...