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The Sun warms the ground, which in turn warms the air directly above it. The warmer air expands, becoming less dense than the surrounding air mass, and creating a thermal low . [ 4 ] [ 5 ] The mass of lighter air rises, and as it does, it cools due to its expansion at lower high-altitude pressures.
A warmer air mass moving over a cooler one can "shut off" any convection which may be present in the cooler air mass: this is known as a capping inversion. However, if this cap is broken, either by extreme convection overcoming the cap or by the lifting effect of a front or a mountain range, the sudden release of bottled-up convective energy ...
Convection occurs on a large scale in atmospheres, oceans, planetary mantles, and it provides the mechanism of heat transfer for a large fraction of the outermost interiors of the Sun and all stars. Fluid movement during convection may be invisibly slow, or it may be obvious and rapid, as in a hurricane .
At any one time, the Sun's surface is covered by about 4 million granules. Below the photosphere is a layer of "supergranules" up to 30,000 kilometres (19,000 mi) in diameter with lifespans of up to 24 hours.
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 ...
In solar physics and observation, supergranulation is a pattern of convection cells in the Sun's photosphere. The individual convection cells are typically referred to as supergranules . The pattern was discovered in the 1950s by A.B. Hart [ 1 ] using Doppler velocity measurements showing horizontal flows on the photosphere (flow speed about ...
This winter is forecast to bring sudden bouts of extreme cold to Texas that could test the state's electric grid in early 2025, the grid operator's chief meteorologist said on Tuesday, reviving ...
Because of the extremely high altitudes of these clouds in what is now known to be the mesosphere, they can become illuminated by the sun's rays when the sky is nearly dark after sunset and before sunrise. [65] 1892 – William Henry Dines invented another kind of anemometer, called the pressure-tube (Dines) anemometer. His device measured the ...