Meteorology. Rivers in the sky are flooding the world with tropical waters

The Earth’s hydrosphere includes all of the areas where the storage and movement of water occurs. Since water is the basis of all living processes, the cycling of water is extremely important to ecosystem dynamics.

Overview

Climate refers to the prevailing weather conditions in a specific area over an extended period. As the saying goes, “Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get.” Climate is influenced by geographic factors, such as latitude, terrain, and proximity to bodies of water.

Throughout its ~4.5 billion year history, the Earth has experienced periods of warming and cooling. However, the current drastic increase in global temperatures is well outside of the Earth’s cyclic norms, and evidence for human-caused global climate change is compelling. Paleoclimatology, the study of ancient climate conditions, provides ample evidence for human-caused global climate change by comparing recent conditions with those in the past.

The average temperature of Earth is the subject of much current discussion. Earth is in radiative contact with both the Sun and dark space; it receives almost all its energy from the radiation of the Sun and reflects some of it into outer space. Dark space is very cold, about 3 K, so Earth radiates energy into it. For instance, heat transfer occurs from soil and grasses, the rate of which can be so rapid that frost can occur on clear summer evenings, even in warm latitudes.
The average...

Understanding the movement of air masses is fundamental to meteorological analysis and atmospheric modeling. A key component in this process is quantifying the total mass of air that flows into or out of a defined region over a specified period of time. This is achieved by evaluating the mass flux across a boundary surface, a conceptual tool that simplifies the complex dynamics of atmospheric systems.To begin, an imaginary boundary surface S is introduced, enclosing the region of interest. The...