Questions tagged [climatology]
In contrast to the short-term variable weather, climate describes the mean conditions of atmosphere. Thus it is the statistic of weather (mean values, extrema, etc.). Often a 30-year period is considered. When asking questions about climate, use this tag and also include the [atmosphere] tag.
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How to define sub-year groupings in ISO-8601 for climatology - What week numbers constitute a season?
ISO 8601 is a time/date standard that allows for sub-year groupings - for example, 2024-25 indicates a time period of Spring in the Northern Hemisphere, year 2024.
I am constructing a climatological ...
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Why is the climate for the north-eastern coast of North America continental (D), not temperate (C)?
Regions of north-eastern North America such as Long Island, New England and the Maritimes, are classified as Dfa and Dfb in the Köppen-Geiger classification, despite being on the coast. Why don't they ...
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Where does snow falling at the polar ice caps originate?
Where did the water originally evaporate when snow falls at the polar and Greenland ice caps?
I can think of two ideas:
The water mostly evaporates from the nearest ice-free ocean because water ...
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Compute ERA5 daily climatology without consuming lot of memory
I am trying to compute daily climatology of ERA5 data, but without using append and concat so that I do not consume a lot of memory.
My idea was to read every file and update it by adding the next ...
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Collapse of the AMOC - effects
What are the potential effects of an eventual collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC)?
I often see news viting everything ranging from droughts in India to increased climate ...
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What determines and confirms sensitivity of glaciers to climate change/ climate forcing?
Consider two groups of glaciers, say Group A and Group B. For simplicity, let's consider the group to fall in one size class (say 1-5 sq km), both located in the same kind of climate. We DO NOT know ...
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What is the climate footprint of burning lignite coal - once you account for the athmosheric cooling effect of sulfur dioxide?
Sulfur oxides have a strong but short lasting athmosheric cooling effect. Vulcanic eruptions provide test of that. Lignite or "brown coal" has a reputaion as a paricularly "dirty" ...
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Effect of eccentricity and axial precession on glaciation/deglaciation
Having learned about the Milankovitch cycles, I've found two entirely separate explanations from different sources on how the combination of precession and eccentricity changes affect glaciation vs ...
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Why is it that the Holocene's temperature is much more stable than the Pleistocene?
I'm currently in university for environmental science, and in a lecture on paleoclimate our professor showed some graphs of climate in the Holocene and Pleistocene periods (included below), then ...
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What is a rough estimate for the number of people who have been in a tornado in their lifetime?
Discussing the relative risk of tornadoes vs earthquakes with a friend got me thinking about roughly how many people have been in tornadoes in their lifetime, which may be a statistic that would help ...
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Reconstructing the climatology of a station using reanalysis
We have lots of data measured by weather stations in our network, but unfortunately their temporal coverage is not sufficient to compute a full 30 years climatology (e.g. over the 1991-2020 period). ...
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How does the rotation of Earth's inner core influence climate?
In the recent paper published in Nature that sugests a 60-70 years inner core rotation cycle, it is said:
Interestingly, the same multidecadal periodicity is also well observed
in the Earth’s climate ...
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How much fresh water could be produced by pumping warm humid air through a pipeline up to the top of a mountain?
I have been doing a lot of research on the Internet lately about various desalination processes which are being used today and this led me to begin studying about mountain weather and the orographic ...
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Does climate change generate more cold waves?
I answered to this question some time ago:
Who are winners from the global warming? Are there any?
The user asked if Russia would benefit from climate change.
I found a paper that asserts:
Our ...
user28185
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How does a sepiolite deposit form?
I'm interested in a material known as sepiolite. Wikipedia has the articles sepiolite in English and Sepiolita. in Spanish.
I'm more a person who tends to be more mathematical. But I'm interested in ...
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Maximum Air Temperature Decrease Over Time
Based on the maximum air temperature Time series plot plot below. What could be a possible reason(s) for Maximum Temperature to ...
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How do you convert the μmol/mol units for atmospheric CO2 into CO2 mass fraction?
The Keeling curve reports CO2 in units of μmol/mol, but people's (and country's) emissions are generally reported in kilograms or tons of CO2. I would like to convert μmol/mol of CO2 in the atmosphere ...
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Why aren't diatoms' shells used as a temperature proxy, but foraminifera shells are?
Changes in oceanic oxygen isotope ratios (18O to 16O) are reflected in the shells of ancient foraminifera.
However, I have not read of diatom shells being used, despite the fact that they were (and ...
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Efficient way to find spatial extrema in 2-D space time netcdf field
I have a 2-D latitude-time zonal wind netCDF dataset (such as this small sample from ERA-Interim) from which I want to find all local maxima of the zonal wind as a function of latitude, for each time ...
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Do "aerosol shields" protect big emitters from the impact of their own GHGs?
Green house gases typically have higher lifetimes than aerosols and their precursors (e.g. SO2) so, as I understand it, GHGs usually spread more or less evenly across continents, no matter where they ...
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Why does cloud cover seem to "ride" a wave that propagates westward near the equator in this video?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVRbeGc_6zM
Notice that the cloud cover over Africa and South America is correlated in a way that seems to be highlighting some kind of large-scale easterly wave ...
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Do greenhouse gases absorb and re-emit photons or reflect them diffusely? Or both? (CO2, CH4, H2O, N20, HFC-134a, etc.)
Also, would it matter if a particular type of greenhouse gas molecule reflected rather than absorbed and then re-emitted light? Would its GWP be higher or lower?
Perhaps this is more of a pure ...
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Does increased water vapour in atmosphere increase the risk of hypoxia?
I recently found that each degree of warming increases water vapour by 7% and I've also learned that the atmosphere contains (on average) between 1-5% water vapour when saturated, this confused me a ...
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How can I calculate the relative change in Precipitation using CMIP models without producing unrealistic results in Dry areas?
I am calculating changes in precipitation using the Delta method, wherein the relative changes are calculated thus:
Delta change = (modelled Future climatology (2050s) - modelled historical ...
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When would the next glaciation appear? Worst case
Suppose that the IPCC's best estimate of climate sensitivity (3 K) is relevant and that the Keeling curve will increase as now, with a certain procent more emission next year than previous year, into ...
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Does deforestation increase global temperatures or just local temperatures?
Did human-caused deforestation impacted climate and rainfall patterns in the past?
I'm asking this because I don't know much about the impact of forest cover loss and evapotranspiration on global ...
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How to Distribute Soil moisture output of Thornthwaite and Mather (1954) Soil Water Balance Model into different layers?
in Thornthwaite & Mather (1954) Soil Water Balance Approach
The soil moisture output is generated for the whole soil profile, i.e whatever depth we take for the ...
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From ice core analysis to temperature curves
In ice cores a lot of data are measured and analyzed and can be plotted versus depth, for example
age of layers
thickness of layers
concentration of spurious gases
concentration of solids
delta ...
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Climate on Venus after it becomes tidally locked
Suppose, Venus becomes tidally locked. Will its dark side cool enough so that the CO2 from atmosphere to precipitate in liquid form to make an ocean?
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How to convert Relative humidity (%) or Specific humidity (kg/kg) to Air humidity (mb)?
The model I use needs the data of Air humidity and unit is 'mb' (there is no other explanations about this variable), but now I only have two datasets and there are Relative humidity (%) or Specific ...
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Can the absorbtion of infrared around the 650 wavenumber in water be a substantial cause of converting that spectrum range into other spectra?
CO2 absorbs around the 15 microns wavelenght or wavenumber 650, and radiates in the same but also a somewhat wider range.
However, the top layer of the oceans seem to also convert that spectrum range. ...
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Is it possible to kickstart an hypothetical frozen earth with 0.6 ice albedo to an earth with an atmosphere, with just the sun at current distance?
Phase change of water at different pressures and temperatures tell us that with no atmospheric pressure 200 Kelvin (minus 73 Celcius) is enough to turn ice into vapor directly
Wouldn't that suggest ...
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Why has the Earth's average sea level risen 'only' by nine inches after one degree C increase in temperature?
I am only doing gross calculations here, but...
If the Earth has warmed by about one degree Celsius in the last century or so, and the thermal expansion coefficient of water is about .0002085, then ...
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Which part of solar radiation (VIS, NIR) keeps Earth warm?
Which part of solar radiation (visible light vs. infrared radiation) plays main part in keeping Earth's surface warm?
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difference between climatology and meteorology only [duplicate]
Some basic differences are needed for children to understand only. The language should be simple enough so that any age understands for 5 to 99 or maybe 100.
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Why does Panama have a dry season?
So, I understand that during much of the year, Panama gets regular rain due to moist air being carried in by the trade winds from the Caribbean.
However, the country also has a "dry season" from ...
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"steep slope" when cold fronts encounter warm fronts: Confusing sentence in textbook
I'm currently reading a university textbook on processes that result in rainfall events. In the current processes, I'm reading there is a cold front that basically pushes warm air upwards which ...
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How can we best objectively quantify climate change mitigation urgency? [closed]
Quantifying climate change mitigation urgency seems to have three aspects:
(1) Green House Gas reduction targets required to meet a specific goal such as 2C.
The first guesstimate seems to be zero ...
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What exactly is a published climatologist?
I am trying to get Gallup to do a scientific poll of published climatologists to greatly strengthen the credibility of the 97% consensus.
This must start with very excellent formal definitions of ...
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Author's Name Of A Book On Bill Maher's Shelf [closed]
Could any of you, please, tell me who is the author of this book on Bill Maher's shelf? The book name is "Climate Science" and the cover color seems to be green. I looked for it on the Amazon website ...
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Are Ice Ages Affected by the Freezing Out of CO2 in Antarctica?
The freezing point of carbon dioxide is -78.5 $\small\mathsf{^o}$C. Occasionally this low is exceeded in Antarctica, and small quantities of CO2 are frozen out, but are returned soon after to the ...
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Increase Evaporation from oceans
I would like to ask you about evaporation from sea water. Can you increase evaporation by spraying seawater to the air? Is there any difference compared to freshwater spraying (aerosol particles)?
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How to calculate maximum and minimum mean monthly temperatures?
A quite simple question that I hope someone can help me with. I have a massive database of hourly minimum and maximum temperatures, from many automatic weather stations. I need to estimate the average ...
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Why is wind shear consistently high in the South Atlantic?
I have read that perhaps the largest reason that tropical cyclones are so rare in the South Atlantic is due to chronically-high vertical wind shear which inhibits their structural development. But ...
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Can we see the circulation cells in wind maps?
Earth famously possesses three distinct circulation cells per hemisphere.
Now out of curiosity one could use a weather app, like windy, to display the wind structures at ground level globally, and ...
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If today's Earth becomes warmer, how will it compare to the Earth of the Cretaceous period?
Most pessimistic scenarios about climate change predicts a global rise of temperature of several Celsius degrees over the course of the 21st century if no action is taken. While such a shift in ...
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The Medieval Climatic Anomaly
Trying to understand this question, posted to me by a lecturer at University:
"The Medieval Climatic Anomaly was distinctive in terms of the
prevailing climates and forcing mechanisms operating ...
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Do cloud formations change depending on the season?
I'm currently working on some software for cloud masking, and thus far I have only been using satellite data as recent as spring (northern hemisphere). However, I'm wondering if cloud coverage or ...
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How to improve this prediction about the climate in future?
The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the more global warming. The more global warming the more cloud formations that cool the earth and clean the air from carbon dioxid when rain- and snowfall, ...
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Which are the mechanisms of the correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxid and global warming/cooling?
In the end of glacial periods there seems to be an increasing release of carbon dioxide as the global warming increase and at the end of these global warming periods the content of carbon dioxide in ...
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