Guest post by Erl Happ
Here’s a hypothetical:
Let’s imagine that we have an atmosphere of two parts. The first 10 km of the atmosphere has no greenhouse gas. The second 40 km has a greenhouse gas incorporated.
In the lower layer there is water vapor and clouds that come and go according to the temperature of the air.
Let’s consider that there is an impermeable membrane over the surface preventing the interchange of moisture with the atmosphere. No precipitation of moisture from the atmosphere falls to the surface.
Now, set this planet spinning in space around a sun in such a way that the polar sections experienced permanent night for part of the year so that the entire depth of the atmosphere (both layers) within the polar night region cool down and a gradient of ever diminishing temperature occurs all the way from the surface to the top of the atmosphere, the entire 50 kilometers.
Parts of the planet would be warm and parts would be cold. Ascent and descent of the atmosphere is forced by these thermal differences but the ascent is usually confined to just a few kilometers in elevation.
Now, let’s imagine that the greenhouse gas is water soluble. That part of the atmosphere that contains the least water is within the polar night because it is coldest, so the greenhouse gas attains a higher concentration there.
That greenhouse gas absorbs long wave radiation from the planet. This sets up a convective circulation within the polar night that spins the greenhouse gas rich air away from the pole towards the margins of the polar night. Remember that temperature descends all the way from the bottom to the top of the atmosphere within the polar night and this promotes convection throughout the entire profile. In fact the two layers act as a coupled circulation.
So, greenhouse gas descends into the near surface layer on the margins of the polar night that hitherto was entirely free of greenhouse gas. This causes the air on the margins of the polar night to warm as it descends. Surface pressure falls away in this region.
Now, if this circulation came and went, we would see clouds come and go on the margins of the polar night as the air alternatively cooled and warmed.
Now, let us imagine that there is a wind that blows from the polar night towards the equator that carries greenhouse gas towards the equator warming the air and causing cloud to disappear.
Now, let us introduce land and sea in the winter hemisphere and assume that the air on the margins of the polar night descends preferentially over the sea. We would then expect the greenhouse gas to be concentrated in the atmosphere over the sea. This would give rise to a pattern of warm and cool air, clouds in the cool zone and none in the warm zone. A cloud free path would be set up that ran from the warmer margins of the night zone towards the equator. The cloud would come and go as the coupled circulation waxed and waned.
The lower of the two layers would show zones of warmed air like the map below.
Figure 1
And under the influence of the wind that blows towards the equator we might see a pattern of sea surface temperature like this:
Figure 2
Now, let’s imagine that there is an insidious chemical generated in the rarefied atmosphere above both layers that has an affinity for the greenhouse gas and this chemical is intermittently trickled into the top of the layer containing the greenhouse gas and this occurs over the pole. This is accomplished by a thing we call the ‘night jet’. Accordingly, the greenhouse gas content of the night zone would wax and wane causing a fluctuation in cloud and the temperature of the sea.
If we wished to know what was changing the weather and the climate we would have to look at what changes the trickle rate and what causes the polar circulation to wax and wane.
We look closely and find the ‘night jet’ is active when surface pressure is high.
We discover that the pressure is high when the sun is less active.
When the sun is active pressure is low and the night jet is less active, the greenhouse gas content builds up, the temperature of the column increases and the convective circulation goes into overdrive. And the clouds disappear.
And the temperature of the polar stratosphere might look like this:
Figure 3
So, in this circumstance the planet warms. Does anyone recognize the origin of the great Pacific Climate Shift of 1976-8?
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Erl, has enticed the prey to the bait.
I’m enjoying the show.
Good stuff.
Leif,
Thank for the paper on the CO2 content of the stratosphere. It is a useful tracer to hint at the direction of movement of the air and a nice way to register the fact that in the chemical soup up there gases do interact chemically in a manner that we can at this stage only speculate about. Nitrous oxides are potent agents for change apparently, even with CO2 and there is apparently some evidence of exchange of constituents at the molecular level even as low as 25km in elevation.
But, as you can see I am talking about ozone as the greenhouse gas not CO2 or water vapour. That gives the coupling of the troposphere and the stratosphere at the poles the power to change weather and climate.
erl happ says:
August 20, 2011 at 6:30 pm
But, as you can see I am talking about ozone as the greenhouse gas not CO2 or water vapour.
You were VERY coy about that, calling it ‘that greenhouse gas’, not telling anybody what it was. And still: “Now, let’s imagine that the greenhouse gas is water soluble” is nonsense in the context as there is no water in the stratosphere. Perhaps you also mean to say something else here.
“Yes water vapor is opaque to IR. As is C02.”
This is not correct CO2 only aborbs in a narrow wavelength range around 14.8 micron but it is transparent for most of the IR range of 4 to 25 micron
##
yes there are windows.
check the stratosphere which is dry and where C02 does a wonderful job.
It would seem to me that temps at some of the altitudes mentioned are relatively meaningless,
Half the atmosphere lies below 18,000 feet, at 50,000 feet your blood will boil. Moving heat via conduction requires mass, so the heavy lifting convection wise has to occur at lower altitudes.
And dont forget about doppler broadening
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CCYQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnit.colorado.edu%2Fatoc5560%2Fweek4.pdf&ei=-WdQTu3eNYmDsgK4vPXDBg&usg=AFQjCNEZ4eBWftW0uqM0Iz8R-MqWQ4gUvw&sig2=3uADjSeodQisIDI5Z7-C_g
The special effects of C02 in the strat gained ground in the 1950s. In fact, some people thought that C02 would have little effect because of its overlap with H20 lines. However, when the Air Force found that the Strat was dry, this view quickly vanished in light of that evidence (observations ya know) .here is an early dissertation on the matter
circa 1964.
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/8439/4/bad5362.0001.001.txt
“in infrared radiative transfer in the stratosphere. Gold considered
carbon dioxide, water vapor and ozone in the stratosphere. He used the
absorptivity measurements of Angstron in his calculations. The main
assumption in his work was that the various absorbing gases acted as
black bodies for emission. Humphreys, however, noted that this assumption might not be correct. Gold’s main result was that the stratosphere
does not absorb enough radiation to induce convection. Humphreys’ paper
is mostly a review and contains some suggestions for further research.
After these two papers little effort was devoted to the problem
until 1937 when Godfrey and Price investigated infrared radiation effects in the atmosphere above 100 km. They considered ozone, water
vapor and oxygen. Unfortunately they did not consider the breakdown of
local thermodynamic equilibrium due to the relaxation of the ozone and
water vapor molecules. The importance of this had been noted by Milne
(1930), who worked out the radiative transfer equation for a two-state
relaxing gas. The neglect of relaxation invalidates Godfrey and Price’s
results.
In the period from 1909 to 1937, while little effort was being devoted to infrared radiation in the stratosphere, considerable progress
was being made in understanding the structure of molecular bands and
measuring the absorptivities of the various molecular bands of atmospheric interest in the laboratory. The University of Michigan was one
of theleaders in the field producing three classic pieces of research.
Martin and Barker (1952) investigated the infrared spectrum of carbon…..”
Read it all. Long before AGW we understood the role of C02. We had to, to build better radars, sensors, airplanes, you name it.
Of course we’ve learned a lot since then. Ask Leif
Leif Svalgaard,
“The CLOUD crew promised publication in August. Nothing yet. They have 11 days left…”
I wonder if everyone had to rewrite their papers after they were told they couldn’t interpret the data or just decided not to publish.
George E. Smith says:
August 20, 2011 at 6:10 pm
Why aren’t I sticking to the script?
The point is this: There is actually very little ozone in the troposphere. But, the exception that occurs at high latitudes is very influential. I am describing a dynamic situation. The more interesting scripts do involve some character starting to behave in a way that is unexpected. Call him the independent variable, the villain of the piece or the only greenhouse gas that matters a hill of beans. That works.
Leif Svalgaard says:
August 20, 2011 at 6:35 pm
Re: “And still “Now, let’s imagine that the greenhouse gas is water soluble” is nonsense
in the context as there is no water in the stratosphere. Perhaps you also mean to say something else here.”
No I don’t mean to say something else and Yes, trace amounts of water vapour get into the stratosphere and its perhaps partly responsible for the low levels of ozone in the stratosphere over the equator where the splitting of the oxygen molecule is most active. As I mentioned the tropopause is forced up to 18-20km at the equator due to uplift of water vapour and the consequent erosion of ozone. Ozone is responsible for the temperature inversion at the tropopause. However, in the night zone in winter the temperature inversion rises from say 8 km to 45 km and this has dramatic consequences in generating a coupled circulation that varies in strength according to the flux in its ozone content. The uplift depends upon the presence of ozone as an OLR absorber.
I did not identify ‘ozone’ because it rarely gets a mention as a greenhouse gas and I wanted to get people to consider the layering effect and the response in the troposphere when that greenhouse gas (of which there is very little in the troposphere) gets incorporated due to the coupling of the circulation at very high latitudes.
But whether water vapour gets into the stratosphere or not is immaterial to the argument. There is not much water in the troposphere at the pole either and that is what allows ozone to persist and do the damage so far as cloud cover is concerned. I could have left that bit out except I wanted people to recognize that the stratosphere is warmer at the poles than at the equator, it is still warm in winter when there is no light and that is when we see the greatest swings in temperature and that in turn is due to the phenomenon of the coupled circulation. All this is important to the explanation of why temperature evolves as it does, the subject of the next post.
erl happ says:
August 20, 2011 at 7:44 pm
And still “Now, let’s imagine that the greenhouse gas is water soluble” is nonsense as there is no water in the stratosphere.
Leif Svalgaard says: “Erl said: “Now, let’s imagine that the greenhouse gas is water soluble….”…”
This sounds like nonsense to me. Gases mix, don’t dissolve into each other…
CO2 and ozone are both soluble in water, I have a bottle of CO2 dissolved in water in my refrigerator. Rain is water. If there’s more rain in the tropics, we’ll see a higher concentration of CO2 at the poles. Sounds like sense, to me.
jorgekafkazar says:
August 20, 2011 at 8:28 pm
CO2 and ozone are both soluble in water, I have a bottle of CO2 dissolved in water in my refrigerator. Rain is water. If there’s more rain in the tropics, we’ll see a higher concentration of CO2 at the poles. Sounds like sense, to me.
Except there is no water in the stratosphere.
jorgekafkazar says:
August 20, 2011 at 8:28 pm
CO2 and ozone are both soluble in water, I have a bottle of CO2 dissolved in water in my refrigerator. Rain is water. If there’s more rain in the tropics, we’ll see a higher concentration of CO2 at the poles. Sounds like sense, to me.
Except that there is no water in the stratosphere.
Leif Svalgaard says:
August 20, 2011 at 7:56 pm
‘There’s no water in the stratosphere”.
You are out on a limb here Leif:
We are talking trace amounts of water vapour, ice and water too. According to some: Water vapor in the stratosphere has two main sources. One is transport of water vapor from the troposphere which occurs mainly as air rises in the tropics. The other is the oxidation of methane which occurs mostly in the upper stratosphere.
Average temperature in the upper stratosphere climbs above freezing point. What is the daytime maximum and how far down does that zero maximum extend?
Vapor is chemically available as is ice. There’s always a little warming and cooling going on. Ice sublimates straight to vapour.
Google has this:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/shindell_05/
Reaction of Ozone and Climate to Increasing Stratospheric Water Vapor
By Drew Shindell — May 2001
The abundance of water vapor in the stratosphere affects ozone, surface climate, and stratospheric temperatures. Increases in stratospheric moisture that have been observed for the past several decades may therefore have important consequences.
Here is a nice collection http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/2010/05/15/papers-on-stratospheric-water-vapor/, including this overview:
Overview of the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment II Water Vapor Observations: Method, Validation, and Data Characteristics – Rind et al. (1993) “Water vapor observations obtained from the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment II (SAGE II) solar occultation instrument for the troposphere and stratosphere are presented and compared with correlative in situ measurement techniques and other satellite data. … …minimum water vapor values of 2.5–3 ppmv in the tropical lower stratosphere, with lower values during northern hemisphere winter and spring; slowly increasing water vapor values with altitude in the stratosphere, reaching 5–6 ppmv or greater near the stratopause; extratropical values with minimum profile amounts occurring above the conventionally defined tropopause; and higher extratropical than tropical water vapor values throughout the stratosphere except in locations of possible polar stratospheric clouds.”
If you keep this up I might have to revise my perceptions about ‘red herrings’.
It’s not important. Can we get back to the thesis?
erl happ says:
August 20, 2011 at 9:13 pm
Water vapor in the stratosphere has two main sources. […]
Can we get back to the thesis?
Your thesis [as you laid it out] is this:
Now, let’s imagine that the greenhouse gas is water soluble. That part of the atmosphere that contains the least water is within the polar night because it is coldest, so the greenhouse gas attains a higher concentration there. […]
Remember that temperature descends all the way from the bottom to the top of the atmosphere
So, ozone is taken up by liquid water. If there is not enough liquid water, ozone concentration increases. Finally you seem to believe that the temperature decreases [descends?] all the way from the surface to the ‘top’ of the atmosphere [including the 1000 degree thermosphere?].
erl happ says:
August 20, 2011 at 9:13 pm
Can we get back to the thesis?
Your thesis [as you laid it out] is this:
Now, let’s imagine that the greenhouse gas is water soluble. That part of the atmosphere that contains the least water is within the polar night because it is coldest, so the ozone attains a higher concentration there. Since ozone warms the atmosphere, the coldest part is warmed the most. Makes sense?
Leif Svalgaard says: (several times)
Ozone is soluble in water
There is no water in the stratosphere. Just [precious little] ice and water vapor.
+++++++
Part of my work is measuring particles from domestic combustion devices and there is a great deal of water vapour produced combusting nearly all fuels. Particles are often thought of as being ‘solid’ but floating droplets of, say, creosote, are sticky particles if the creosote is cooled. In order to determine what is being emitted from combustion we cool the smoke and condense the vapours into particles just as they would condense when entering the atmosphere. This is done in a diluter which simultaneously reduces the concentration of particles to something that instruments can cope with counting.
In this process, hot water vapour cools and condenses producing numerous small droplets of water. They are not necessarily visible like (the mis-named) ‘steam’ one sees above a kettle mouth. The problem is they get counted as ‘particles’ because they are particles and at least some of them are above 0.1 microns in diameter making them detectable by a visible laser – but I don’t care about them. They mess up the particle count so we dilute the sample using dry air which reduces the dew point to a low value and the H2O remains in a vapour state while cooling.
My point is that transparent-to-the-eye air can have a great deal of water in it, not in the form of water vapour. Even at high altitude, droplets do not necessarily freeze but can remain supercooled, and do not have to evaporate, depending on lcoal conditions. It is often mistated that air contains water vapour and cloud/rain drops only. Visible light readings of cloud cover from satellites do not give an accurate assessment of all cloud cover because all the water droplets below 0.1 microns are invisible in normal light. The CLOUD experimenters probably did not measure sub-0.1 micron water droplet formation because everyone forgets about it and looks for ‘clouds’.
Regions around visible clouds contain such small water particles. GCR’s cause the formation of very small cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) with a slight charge on them such that they avoid each other longer than is normally the case (they get larger by collisions which overcome the charge). Again, this is a large quantity of water not in the form of vapour, and not large or concentrated enough to look like a ‘cloud’. They absorb CO2 and remove ozone, but are counted as ‘water vapour’, being the name assigned to all H2O content of an air sample.
It seems unlikely these water particles absorb and emit LWIR in the same manner as water vapour molecules but I have not seen anything written about this property. The common and incorrect assumption is that if it is not visible as ‘cloud’ it is in gaseous form.
Leif Svalgaard says:
August 20, 2011 at 10:18 pm
Leif, I know you like to be a man of few words but can you make your point in a less obscure fashion?
Do you want to contest the point that:
1. The stratosphere is warmest at the poles? Then go here: http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/temperature/
2. The polar stratosphere in winter cools with increasing elevation then look at figure 8 here:http://www.happs.com.au/images/stories/PDFarticles/TheCommonSenseOfClimateChange.pdf
3. The stratosphere and the troposphere are coupled in a single monolithic circulation in winter and this affects surface temperature? Then go here: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JAS-3321.1 or simply examine figure 1 and 2 in the post above or look at chapter 10 in the reference I give in point 2.
Is the coldest part of the stratosphere, that part in the polar night, warmed the most? Not at all. I wrote:” the greenhouse gas attains a higher concentration there. That greenhouse gas absorbs long wave radiation from the planet. This sets up a convective circulation within the polar night that spins the greenhouse gas rich air away from the pole towards the margins of the polar night.”
But the temperature does change dramatically while the area is dark. For the Arctic see this: http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Regardless of the concentration of ozone in the polar night, it is there, it warms by absorbing OLR and a coupled circulation occurs with the consequence that surface pressure is lowered on the margins of Antarctica and at 50-60° north as ozone is driven into the troposphere and it warms. This circulation is pretty well perennial in the Antarctic and very rarely stalls. It is the coldest parts of the polar stratosphere that sinks into the troposphere.
We know that the concentration of ozone is always in a state of change at the pole due to the activity of the night jet so there is nothing static about this at all. Its a highly dynamic system. And we also know that the temperature of the stratosphere over the southern pole has changed dramatically over time reflecting change in ozone content. See figure 3 above. There is nowhere else in the stratosphere that it changes so much. See the variability at http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/temperature/
Leif
Re: “Finally you seem to believe that the temperature decreases [descends?] all the way from the surface to the ‘top’ of the atmosphere [including the 1000 degree thermosphere?].”
What I wrote was: Remember that temperature descends all the way from the bottom to the top of the atmosphere within the polar night.
And I am modelling a two layer atmosphere, not three or four. The thermosphere is outside the polar night zone I would have thought.
Hey, lets cut to the chase. Do we have a mechanism for cloud cover change or not and if not why not?
Unseen vapors rise,
Quiet equatorial.
Poles apart convect.
=============
And under the influence of the wind that blows towards the equator we might see a pattern of sea surface temperature like this: (Figure 2)
Sorry, but this is just so wrong. At the demonstrated latitudes at surface level the wind blows from the equator. Most often exactly to the opposite direction as depicted. We are now having some nice weather here in Germany (50° N) because the wind is blowing warm, subtropical air from the south to the north.
Leif Svalgaard says:
Except there is no water in the stratosphere.
There has been an increase in stratospheric water vapor, and the El Chichon and Pinatubo eruptions are likely causes. This also means that the stepwise stratospheric cooling seen e.g. here: http://www.ssmi.com/data/msu/graphics/tls/plots/sc_Rss_compare_TS_channel_tls_v03_3.png (note that the warming due to the volcanoes are followed by a decrease to below the previous temperature) may have been caused partly by these volcanoes (so that stratospheric cooling “proves” AGW theory is not as well-supported as many advocates claim).
See: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0442(2003)016%3C3525%3AAGSOVE%3E2.0.CO%3B2#h1
Welcome Kim,
The solar wind blows,
The atmosphere shifts equator-ward, cooling aloft.
Expect clear skies in southern seas and the westerlies to roar.
erl, I am asked to imagine a series of so many unlikely or impossible things that in the end I was sure I was imagining what you were imagining.
I had an immediate problem, ‘the first 10 km of the atmosphere has no greenhouse gas’. Is this the ‘lower’ part of the atmosphere or the upper part of the atmosphere – not explicit – so I assume you mean the lower 10km. But then I am told “In the lower layer there is water vapor”. As Leif has said, water vapour is a greenhouse gas, so I am lost already. If you wish to chain together a long list of imaginary events for a thought experiment it is helpful to be clear at each step. I couldn’t get to the end because of frustration.
I hope the winemaking is doing better.
Steve Mosher, CO2 is opaque to CO2? Shame on you!
As Cementafriend says, CO2 only absorbs in specific wavelength bands, and within those bands the concentration and path length determine whether it is opaque or not. Over most of the infrared spectrum, CO2 is transparent.
erl happ says:
August 21, 2011 at 12:40 am
The thermosphere is outside the polar night zone I would have thought.
The thermosphere extends from 80 to 500 km. The atmosphere is in the dark up to 575 km in the polar night. Anyway, Your thesis seems to be:
ozone is taken up by liquid water. If there is not enough liquid water, ozone concentration increases. Ozone is a greenhouse gas and thus heats up the atmosphere where there is no liquid water.
There is no liquid water in the stratosphere, thus your argument fails right there.
There’s something very missing in this batch of wine. It is too coy.