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The earth atmosphere's scale height is about 8.5 km, as can be confirmed from this diagram of air pressure p by altitude h: At an altitude of 0, 8.5, and 17 km, the pressure is about 1000, 370, and 140 hPa, respectively.
At heights over 100 km, an atmosphere may no longer be well mixed. Then each chemical species has its own scale height. In summary, the mass of Earth's atmosphere is distributed approximately as follows: [37] 50% is below 5.6 km (18,000 ft), 90% is below 16 km (52,000 ft), 99.99997% is below 100 km (62 mi; 330,000 ft), the Kármán line.
The NASA Earth Global Reference Atmospheric Model (Earth-GRAM) was developed by the Marshall Space Flight Center to provide a design reference atmosphere that, unlike the standard atmospheres, allows for geographical variability, a wide range of altitudes (surface to orbital altitudes), and different months and times of day. It can also ...
The COSPAR International Reference Atmosphere (CIRA) 2012 and the ISO 14222 Earth Atmosphere Density standard both recommend NRLMSISE-00 for composition uses. JB2008 is a newer model of the Earth's atmosphere from 120 km to 2000 km, developed by the US Air Force Space Command and Space Environment Technologies taking into account realistic ...
The height at which the atmospheric pressure declines by a factor of e (an irrational number equal to 2.71828) is called the scale height (H). For an atmosphere of uniform temperature, the scale height is proportional to the atmospheric temperature and is inversely proportional to the product of the mean molecular mass of dry air, and the local ...
This latter equation can be solved over a single layer of the atmosphere. Since the atmosphere at a height of approximately 5.5 kilometres (3.4 mi) is mostly divergence-free, the barotropic model best approximates the state of the atmosphere at a geopotential height corresponding to that altitude, which corresponds to the atmosphere's 500 mb ...
From the planetary surface of the Earth, the average height of the troposphere is 18 km (11 mi; 59,000 ft) in the tropics; 17 km (11 mi; 56,000 ft) in the middle latitudes; and 6 km (3.7 mi; 20,000 ft) in the high latitudes of the polar regions in winter; thus the average height of the troposphere is 13 km (8.1 mi; 43,000 ft).
Atmospheric circulation is the large-scale movement of air and together with ocean circulation is the means by which thermal energy is redistributed on the surface of the Earth. The Earth's atmospheric circulation varies from year to year, but the large-scale structure of its circulation remains fairly constant.