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Humans are influencing the climate system through emissions of greenhouse gases, aerosols, and land use changes. Volcanoes can eject large amounts of aerosol into the atmosphere with climatic implications. Variations in solar irradiance can cause global climate to change. Water from melting ice flows through rivers into the ocean affecting its salinity, its density and movement. Air temperatures and snow fall affect the growth and melting of glaciers and ice sheets. Wind blowing over the ocean pushes the surface water ahead. Atmosphere and oceans exchange heat, water (evaporation and precipitation), and momentum. Circulations of the air and sea affect temperatures and precipitation over both ocean and land, which impact the biosphere and cryosphere. Heating and cooling affect the temperature and circulation of the atmosphere and oceans. Thus, the atmospheric composition affects the heating and cooling of the earth. Both solar and terrestrial radiation are affected by gases, aerosols, and clouds in the atmosphere. 2 illustrates some of the important processes that contribute to the complex interactions within the climate system. Air warmed by the surface rises and affects the wind. Dark surfaces absorb more sunlight and get warmer compared to bright surfaces such as desert sand or snow. This influences the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth.
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The cloud is carried by winds over land where it rains. The air containing that water rises and cools. Imagine water evaporating from the tropical ocean heated by the sun (Fig. The components interact with each other by exchanging energy, water, momentum, and carbon thus creating a deliciously complex coupled system. Notice in the lower left the thin layer of the atmosphere surrounding Earth. Green colors on land and turquoise shades along the ocean’s margin indicate the biosphere as forests and phytoplankton blooms. The cryosphere is visible as the white areas on the top: sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean and the Greenland ice sheet. The ocean, which covers about 70% of Earth’s surface.
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The atmosphere with its complex cloud patterns. It shows all four components of Earth’s climate system. The lithosphere, which is the solid Earth (upper crust and mantle), could also be considered an active part of Earth’s climate sytem because it responds to ice load and impacts atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2) concentrations and climate on long timescales through the movements of the continents. The biosphere includes all living things on land and in the sea from the smallest microbes to trees and whales. Ice sheets on land, made out of compressed snow, can be several kilometers thick. Sea ice is frozen sea water, up to several meters thick, floating on the ocean. Ice and snow comprises the cryosphere, which includes sea ice, mountain glaciers and ice sheets on land. The major ocean basins are the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian, and the Southern Ocean. Yet all life is constrained to these thin layers. They are comparable perhaps to the outer layer of an onion or the water on a wet soccer ball. In fact, they are about 1,000 times thinner. Contrast those numbers with Earth’s radius which is approximately 6,400 km and you’ll find that Earth’s atmosphere and ocean are very thin layers compared to the size of the planet itself. The ocean covers more than two thirds of Earth’s surface and has an average depth of roughly 4 km. The atmosphere, which is the air and clouds above the surface, is about 10 km thick (more than two thirds of its mass is contained below that height). Weather is what you get.’ b) The Climate SystemĮarth’s climate system consists of interacting components (Fig. For climate, not only the state of the atmosphere is important but also that of the ocean, ice, land surface, and biosphere. Climate is potentially predictable if the forcing is known because Earth’s average temperature is controlled by energy conservation. It does, however, also include other statistics such as probabilities or frequencies of extreme events. It can be thought of as the average weather that varies slowly over periods of months, or longer. Due to the non-linear, chaotic nature of its governing equations, weather predictability is limited to days.Ĭlimate is the statistics of weather over a longer period. It consists of short-term variations over minutes to days of variables such as temperature, precipitation, humidity, air pressure, cloudiness, radiation, wind, and visibility. Weather is the instantaneous state of the atmosphere around us. Weather and climate are related but they differ in the time scales of changes and their predictability.