Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The scientific community has been investigating the causes of climate change for decades. After thousands of studies, the scientific consensus is that it is "unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land since pre-industrial times." [1]: 3 This consensus is supported by around 200 scientific organizations worldwide. [2]
Global surface temperature (GST) is the average temperature of Earth's surface. More precisely, it is the weighted average of the temperatures over the ocean and land. The former is also called sea surface temperature and the latter is called surface air temperature. Temperature data comes mainly from weather stations and satellites.
IPCC Data Distribution Centre Archived 2016-05-19 at the Wayback Machine – Climate data and guidance on use. HistoricalClimatology.com – Past, present and future climates – 2013. Globalclimatemonitor – Contains climatic information from 1901. ClimateCharts – Webapplication to generate climate charts for recent and historical data.
On Earth's surface, temperatures usually range ±40 °C (−40 °F to 104 °F) annually. Over thousands of years, changes in Earth's orbit can affect the amount and distribution of solar energy received by Earth, thus influencing long-term climate and global climate change. Surface temperature differences in turn cause pressure differences.
Diagram of factors that determine climate sensitivity. After increasing CO 2 levels, there is an initial warming. This warming gets amplified by the net effect of climate feedbacks. Climate sensitivity is a key measure in climate science and describes how much Earth's surface will warm for a doubling in the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2 ...
A climate oscillation or climate cycle is any recurring cyclical oscillation within global or regional climate. They are quasiperiodic (not perfectly periodic), so a Fourier analysis of the data does not have sharp peaks in the spectrum. Many oscillations on different time-scales have been found or hypothesized: [23]
In a recent study, [13] researchers from 63 countries combined 30-minutes rainfall data in order to estimate the global rainfall erosivity (an index combining the amount, frequency and intensity of rainfall). The arid and cold climate zones have very low number of erosive events.
Climate classification systems such as the Köppen climate classification system use average annual rainfall to help differentiate between differing climate regimes. Global warming is already causing changes to weather, increasing precipitation in some geographies, and reducing it in others, resulting in additional extreme weather. [5]