Why exactly do high-altitude areas tend to have large diurnal temperatures?

Question

Whenever you go search up the weather for places of high-altitude from the Tibetan, Mongolian, and Andes Plateaus to the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, you can notice that their day-night temperature differences tend to have a relatively wider range compared to their low-lying counterparts. Why is this so?

In: 11

Answer 1

In addition to the thinness of the atmosphere, most (all?) of the areas you’ve mentioned are fairly arid. With less humidity, the ground and air are less able to hold onto heat, especially at night. Any moisture on the ground is more likely to evaporate, taking heat with it. And there is less water vapor to reflect heat back to the ground