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As the abstract makes clear, the finding of Cook et al. (2013) is not really "97% of researchers agree..."; rather, it is "97% of peer-reviewed publications agree". They didn't just go through some directory of climate researchers asking them what they thought. They read the abstracts of all 11,944 publications they found on the topic, and classified them ...

17

There are two factors at work here: Actual occurrence of tornadoes, Reports of tornadoes. Tornadoes are primarily associated with supercell thunderstorms, though they can also be associated with landfalling tropical cyclones, squall lines and bow echoes. Thunderstorms are favored in the afternoon to early evening hours as this is when integrated solar ...

16

The answer is because the Earth is not a static system. Due to the ideal gas law, air cools as it rises. This is referred to as the dry adiabatic lapse rate. However, you are curious why every location on earth is not the same temperature at the same latitude. We know this is not true. But why is not true? Weather. The earth, as with most natural ...

15

Some of the driest deserts on Earth occur in the western side of continents and they are called Coastal Deserts. Examples of such deserts are the Atacama desert (Chile, the driest desert on Earth), the Baja California desert (USA/Mexico), the Namibia desert (southwestern Africa), and the Atlantic coastal desert of Morocco/western Sahara/Mauritania. In mid-...

14

The Atatacma desert comprise a very large area of more than 100,000 square kilometers, that host very different climates. The main factors driving the climatic variability are the distance to the Pacific ocean and elevation. This latter factor is very strong, as the Atacama desert covers a formidable elevation range, from sea level to almost 7,000 m, at the ...

12

Atmospheric science is the generic study of the atmosphere. This includes climatology, air quality, and meteorology. It is often all-encompassing. Climatology- the study of climate, the atmosphere over an extended period of time. This can usually be seen from either a statistical or physical perspective. Usually, the statistical approach looks at climate ...

11

You are correct that solar input on the Tibetan plateau will be the same as a location at sea level at the same latitude. You are also correct that the Sun heats the Earths surface and that in turn heats the atmosphere. Now for the rest of the details. Albedo Albedo is a measure of "whiteness" and gives us an idea of how solar irradiance interacts with ...

11

The specific humidity q is a quotient - mass of water vapor in mass of moist air. The mass is expressed per volume, i.e. the density of water vapor $\rho_v$ and the density of dry air $\rho_d$ are used for the definition of the quotient $q$ known as specific humidity: $$q = \dfrac{\rho_v}{\rho_v+\rho_d}$$

9

The freezing point of carbon dioxide is -78.5C. The temperature at which carbon dioxide sublimates is not a fixed value. It instead is a function of the partial pressure of carbon dioxide. That value of -78.5° C is the temperature at which CO2 sublimates given a partial CO2 pressure of one atmosphere. The temperature needed to have CO2 sublimate given a ...

8

The Indian Summer Monsoon(ISM) has several layers of complexity as it involves interactions between land, sea and atmosphere. This answer will focus on the state of the art overall understanding of the ISM and provide a summary of the salient features of the interactions between land, sea and atmosphere. In general it should be noted that while some ...

8

I haven't been able to find any particular references which hold themselves out as the origin of $q$ as the symbol of choice for specific humidity, but the origin of the term "specific humidity" itself appears to have been in an 1884 article by Dr. W. von Bezold, translated into English and published in the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections (Vol. 51) in ...

8

TLDR; The precipitation values (and possibly some other variables; see below) need to be divided by 24. Background The global attributes of the netCDF file in the question provide an URL to a description page: coastmod.hzg.de From that URL a user should be redirected to wiki.coast.hzg.de/display/MD (access at 9th Feb 2018). Unfortunately, the redirect ...

8

It will depend on the exact definition of "arid" and the period of time. But using the widely used and accepted Köppen climate classification, "arid" would correspond to the four climates in climatic group B: "Dry (desert and semi-arid) climates". Using the most up-to-date present climate data (2006) provided by the WORLD MAPS OF KÖPPEN-GEIGER CLIMATE ...

8

The Köppen climate classification is a classic metric to classify climates: Source: Wikimedia Commons It classifies climates based on the number of months with temperature below and/or above certain thresholds, and on whether rainfall is evenly distributed or concentrated in a particular season. You will find details on the definitions on Wikipedia. An ...

7

Warning: "long-term wind-speed forecasting for generation" has (at least) two very different meanings. One refers to forecasting a distribution of wind speeds; the other refers to hour-by-hour (or half-hour by half-hour) forecasting of wind speeds. Generally, when we talk about long-term forecasting of wind speeds for wind generation, we're talking about ...

7

Looking at the annual climatology of the 200 hPa winds as shown below from NCAR NCEP reanalysis it is noted that the mid latitudes have by and large westerly winds (for a planet that rotates west to east). On the other hand averaged over a latitude circle(zonal average) the low latitude tropics and equator have by and large easterly winds. The reference ...

7

Because of the Coriolis Effect, the prevailing winds on the earth between about the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer go from the East to the West (knows as the Trade Winds). To get to the west coast of a continent within those latitudes, an air mass blowing from above an ocean must cross the entire continent. Along the way, the air mass causes ...

7

Energy balance in the winter is highly dependent on the total amount of area covered by snow or ice. Snow increases the albedo of the Earth which directs the short-wave radiation from the Sun back to space, stopping it from being absorbed by the Earth. Winters with minimal snow/ice cover effectively allow more solar radiation to be absorbed by the Earth. ...

7

Atacama desert is cloudless most part of the year. Except for the litoral, where a fog from the sea goes inland. This phenomena is called camanchaca. Telescopes for astronomy are located in high places, not only to avoid this weather, but also because at high altitudes the atmosphere is thinner and the weather is dry, both good for observation. Besides, ...

7

The slope is the ratio of the vertical to horizontal distance. From here "Warm fronts have a gentler slope and generally move more slowly than cold fronts, so the rising motion along warm fronts is much more gradual." You can see the steep slope of a cold front visualized, and a more gradual slope for the warm front: But depending on the source, ...

6

The relationship of the observed "aquamarine color" near the coast and the Ekman pumping in the open ocean, while possible is rather unlikely. Ekman pumping is confined to the areas affected by the cyclonic wind stress curl and by definition it is mostly effective in the open ocean, where there is no bottom boundary effect. The color of the coastal waters is ...

6

We call this the airborne fraction, although as the name suggests, it's normally expressed as a fraction rather than a percentage. Raupach et al (2014) is an (open access) example of it being used in the literature, and in that paper they quote a long-term 1959 to 2012 value of 0.44, so in the same ball-park as your estimate. Similarly, here's an example ...

6

It actually is the common centi- prefix, but applied to temperature changes in units of Kelvins rather than absolute temperatures. The research as quoted by the Daily Mail obscures this by simplifying the results for a general audience. The analyses and results are much more clearly described in the original refereed journal article, which clearly refers to ...

6

Not answering the question asked, but the underlying motivation: The level of consensus hasn't been verified by a poll. The way the 97% figure has been arrived at, AIUI, is by going through every single peer-reviewed and published paper on the topic of anthropogenic climate change and looking at whether says that it does or does not exist, and then ...

5

Convergent cross mapping (CCM) is a recently developed tool to answer the question you've asked. It's based on tools developed in nonlinear time series analysis and dynamical systems theory. It allows you to: 1) determine if a causal relationship between two variables is present 2) establish the direction of causality 3) do so even in the presence of noise. ...

5

You do not need another Bachelor's degree. After graduating with a bachelors degree in natural science, I taught high school for three years, and then went to graduate school to study air quality in an environmental engineering program. Many students in my group studied air quality / climate change interactions and climate change was a significant part of ...

5

The blog article suggests that the increase in "waste heat" from growing urbanisation is biasing the temperature observations. The problem with this argument is that the heat generated directly from burning fossil fuels is far too small to make a difference, compared to the change in the Earths energy balance due to increasing greenhouse gasses. See: ...

5

Let's start with the trivially true: programming is not earth science; earth science is not programming. Programming is one tool of many in earth science. In programming, the end result is the program itself. In earth science, that's never the case: but one end result is algorithms developed that inform us about the real world, and implemented in a progam. ...

5

WRF model development is done in such a way that users can run the model independently before you start adding more complex options to ingest observations. There is even an "ideal" mode that new users can take advantage of to learn how the system works (not for simulating real Earth situations). In "real" mode, there are typically two types of simulations ...

5

The GFS is a model, and the model have a given time-step equal or smaller than the time-step of the output, that in this case is 3 hours. Different processes can be computed using different or even multiple time-steps. Some of the reported variables are instantaneous, others are cumulative, and others are time averaged. According to the documentation for ...

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