If I open the windows in my room, which has AC turned on and it’s cool in the summer, it will quickly become as hot as it is outside, why isn’t it happening around the globe?
In: Physics
Because some parts of the planet have a lot more energy flowing into them. If you have a heater running in the corner of your room, the air right in front of it will be warmer, even if you have the window open.
Now imagine your heater was thousands of miles from the window.
The globe is huge and the Earth is continually being heated unevenly, the temperature range on Earth is relatively small.
We perceive air as this uniform gas that’s just everywhere, when in reality air actually clumps around itself and forms bubbles and pockets. These bubbles form when air of the same temperature and density clump together. You’ll get bubbles of cold air, bubbles of hot air, bubbles of wet air, bubbles of dry air, etc.
In fact, wind is when these bubbles push against each other. The bubbles are so huge and so sharply determined by their heat and density and humidity, that they don’t just blend into each other: they actually form a wall, or a front, and push against each other.
You may have heard the weather forecast talking about a warm front or a cold front coming in. That’s a big bubble of one type of air pushing another. You get wind at the line where the bubbles meet, and one bubble is pushing the other.
Some airline turbulence is also caused by these bubbles, since they don’t just push around horizontally on the surface of the earth but they stack vertically on top of each other into the stratosphere, too. So sometimes when there’s turbulence or the feeling of a sudden drop while flying, it might be because the plane is punching through one air bubble into the next.
Uneven heating. Heat is added in the day side and lost on the night side much, much faster than the temperature can be equalised through air flow.
Because the energy the earth recieves changes all the time. If the sun is hitting about half of the earth all the time, it’s actively warming that part up while the other half is cooling down, throw in wind, geothermal energy, tidal winds, different altitudes. You get quite a volatile heat distribution that can change rapidly
Areas around the equator receive very strong sunlight and the poles get very diffuse sunlight, so they do receive different amounts of energy.
The heat energy also doesn’t all stay in the earth and its atmosphere, some is lost into space, so it’s not a closed system.
Latest Answers