Related papers: Atmosphere and Greenhouse Gas Primer
A radiative-convective climate model is used to calculate stratospheric temperatures and water vapor concentrations for ozone-free atmospheres warmer than that of modern Earth. Cold, dry stratospheres are predicted at low surface…
The state of earth's climate is constrained by well-known physical principles such as energy balance and the conservation of energy. Increased greenhouse gas concentrations affect the atmospheric optical depth, and physical consistency…
Carbon dioxide is one of the major contributors to the radiative forcing, increasing both the temperature and the humidity of Earth's atmosphere. If the stellar irradiance increases and water becomes abundant in the stratosphere of an…
An old conceptual physics-based back-of-the-envelope model for greenhouse effect is revisited and validated against state-of-the-art reanalyses. Untraditional diagnostics show a physically consistent picture, for which the state of earth's…
Higher concentrations of atmospheric nitrous oxide (N2O) are expected to slightly warm Earth's surface because of increases in radiative forcing. Radiative forcing is the difference in the net upward thermal radiation flux from the Earth…
Understanding processes that determine the global circulation of the atmosphere is necessary for long-term weather forecasting and climate studies which are critical for ensuring energy security. Processes in the atmosphere depend on many…
The general circulation of the atmosphere determines the long-term variability of weather processes. This circulation is driven by the temperature differences between the poles and the equator, causing air to move along the Earth's surface.…
We generalize the problem of the semi-gray model to cases in which a non-negligible fraction of the stellar radiation falls on the long-wavelength range, and/or that the planetary long-wavelength emission penetrates into the transparent…
Climate change is a result of a complex system of interactions of greenhouse gases (GHG), the ocean, land, ice, and clouds. Large climate change models use several computers and solve several equations to predict the future climate. The…
Water vapour is highly subsaturated in much of the Earth's atmosphere. This has important consequences for water vapour feedback, and also for general phenomena such as the runaway greenhouse. In this chapter, we discuss the processes that…
Condensation and sublimation of water vapors (and CO2, CH4, N2O vapors also) in the Earth atmosphere must be accompanied by emission of latent heats on characteristic frequencies marked in absorption spectra. Calculated wave lengths…
The general circulation of the atmosphere determines the long-term variability of weather processes. This circulation is driven by the temperature differences between the poles and the equator, causing air to move along the Earth's surface.…
The climate and circulation of a terrestrial planet are governed by, among other things, the distance to its host star, its size, rotation rate, obliquity, atmospheric composition and gravity. Here we explore the effects of the last of…
Atmospheric ozone plays an important role on the temperature structure of the atmosphere. However, it has not been included in previous studies on the effect of an increasing solar radiation on the Earth's climate. Here we study the climate…
Although non-greenhouse gases can vary substantially in abundance in Earth-like atmospheres, their climatic influences remain insufficiently understood. To investigate how such gases regulate climate, we vary the abundance of N$_2$ as a…
The physical principles governing the planetary atmospheres are briefly introduced in the first part of this chapter, moving from the examples of Solar System bodies. Namely, the concepts of collisional regime, balance equations,…
A minimum atmospheric temperature, or tropopause, occurs at a pressure of around 0.1 bar in the atmospheres of Earth, Titan, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, despite great differences in atmospheric composition, gravity, internal heat…
The mean surface temperature on Earth and other planets with atmospheres is determined by the radiative balance between the non-reflected incoming solar radiation and the outgoing long-wave black-body radiation from the atmosphere. The…
The atmospheric temperatures and concentrations of Earth's five most important, greenhouse gases, H$_2$O, CO$_2$, O$_3$, N$_2$O and CH$_4$ control the cloud-free, thermal radiative flux from the Earth to outer space. Over 1/3 million lines…
One-dimensional (vertical) models of planetary atmospheres typically balance the net solar and internal energy fluxes against the net thermal radiative and convective heat fluxes to determine an equilibrium thermal structure. Thus,simple…