Sentences with phrase «tropics than at the surface»

Not exact matches

In the tropics at heights more than 10 miles above the surface, the prevailing winds alternate between strong easterlies and strong westerlies roughly every other year.

Nathaniel Johnson and Shang - Ping Xie at the University of Hawaii studied satellite and rain - gauge data from the last 30 years and found that sea surface temperatures in the tropics now need to be about 0.3 °C higher than they did in 1980 before the air above rises and produces rain (Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038 / ngeo1008).

Vigorous convective mixing in the deep tropics also dilutes changes in near - surface CO2 much more than at higher latitudes, so low - altitude sampling contains relatively less information about carbon sources and sinks.

[Response: Depends again — the upper troposphere is predicted to warm more than the surface — at least in the tropics.

Actually, though, most of the OLR originates from below the tropopause (can get up around 18 km in the tropics, generally lower)-- with a majority of solar radiation absorbed at the surface, a crude approximation can be made that the area emitting to space is less than 2 * (20/6371) * 100 % ~ = 0.628 % more than the area heated by the sun, so the OLR per unit area should be well within about 0.6 % of the value calculated without the Earth's curvature (I'm guessing it would actually be closer to if not less than 0.3 % different).

However, over land, where there is not very much moist convection, which is not dominated by the tropics and where one expects surface trends to be greater than for the oceans, there was no amplification at all!

Even if clouds were decreasing there would be the clear sky super greenhouse effect where the rate at which downwelling thermal radiation grows relative to increasing temperatures is actually higher in the tropics than the rate at which surface thermal radiation emissions increase.

Knutson and Tuleya (2004) show that climate models run with increasing CO2 project that in the tropics the atmosphere should become more stable as there is more warming aloft than at the surface.

The reason that the upper part of the troposphere is expected in the global average to warm more than the surface is that in the tropics is that one expects the lapse rate to closely follow the moist adiabatic lapse rate, which indeed implies more warming at altitude than at the surface.

If surface temperature is what we care about, and the surface forcing in the tropics is very small, and the tropical ocean surface temperature being more dominated by evaporation than longwave flux, well isn't this more relevant to the problem at hand than the tropospheric radiation balance?