16
votes
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Why are deserts mostly located on the western side of continents?
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), ...
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14
votes
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Is Atacama Desert cloudy or cloudless most of the year?
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 ...
- 17.6k
12
votes
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What are the differences between Climatology, Meteorology and Atmospheric Science?
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 ...
- 8,684
9
votes
Accepted
Long-term Wind Speed Forecasting: reality or wishful thinking?
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 ...
- 4,090
9
votes
Are Ice Ages Affected by the Freezing Out of CO2 in Antarctica?
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 ...
- 23.1k
8
votes
Accepted
Confusion with precipitation values in CORDEX MPI-ESM rcp data
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 ...
- 2,661
8
votes
Accepted
What percentage of Earth's surface is arid?
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 ...
- 17.6k
8
votes
Why are deserts mostly located on the western side of continents?
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 ...
- 2,583
8
votes
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What are good metrics to compare climates?
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 ...
- 11.6k
7
votes
Why do winter temperatures account for most of the increase in global temperature?
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 ...
- 13.5k
7
votes
Is Atacama Desert cloudy or cloudless most of the year?
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 ...
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7
votes
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"steep slope" when cold fronts encounter warm fronts: Confusing sentence in textbook
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 ...
- 13.5k
7
votes
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Why aren't diatoms' shells used as a temperature proxy, but foraminifera shells are?
Lacustrine diatoms are used extensively as reliable conventional proxies in Holocene (within the last 10,000 years) paleoclimate studies. According to this 2010 paper:
(paleoclimate) Reconstructions ...
- 2,783
6
votes
Accepted
Technical term for percentage of CO2 remaining in the atmosphere
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 ...
- 3,940
6
votes
Accepted
What kind of temperature unit is "cK"?
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 ...
- 1,144
6
votes
What exactly is a published climatologist?
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 ...
- 5,800
6
votes
Accepted
How does the rotation of Earth's inner core influence climate?
I have four things to say regarding this:
The paper is far too new. I'm not saying the first paper is wrong (it is in fact rather interesting), but having been published yesterday, it is far too new ...
- 23.1k
5
votes
Accepted
How averaging works in GFS model from NOAA?
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 ...
- 17.6k
5
votes
Accepted
Paper result validation and the scientific method in earth science
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 ...
- 4,090
5
votes
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Climatology Career
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 ...
- 13.5k
5
votes
Does the regional localisation of global temperature trends suggest contamination by urban development?
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 ...
- 1,959
5
votes
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Correlation and causation
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 ...
- 432
5
votes
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Interdisciplinary sciences which combine earth sciences with computer science
Pretty much all Earth Sciences combine deeply with computer sciences. In many areas where the underlying physical phenomena are not well understood, machine learning is often used, and numerical ...
- 17.6k
5
votes
What exactly is a published climatologist?
Regarding Publications
Published in an accredited scientific journal on climatology would seem to meet the spec. Published on some blog about the weather would seem to fail to meet this spec.
I ...
- 24.6k
4
votes
Correlation and causation
I can give some examples from atmospheric science:
Wind and temperature in the vertical direction: as you increase in height, the temperature decreases due to the conservation of geopotential energy. ...
- 8,684
4
votes
Accepted
CMIP5 Historical experiments, what do they mean?
The CMIP5 experimental protocol is documented at https://cmip.llnl.gov/cmip5/docs/Taylor_CMIP5_design.pdf
The historical experiment for a model spans model years 1850-2005 and is initialized from a ...
- 96
4
votes
Accepted
Do "aerosol shields" protect big emitters from the impact of their own GHGs?
Your general line of thinking is correct. However, here are a few things that make the whole concept somewhat more complicated:
It is widely accepted that the general tendency of "global dimming&...
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Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible