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3.1: Introduction
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3.2: Structure and Composition of the Atmosphere
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The atmosphere acts as a compressible fluid tied to the earth by gravitation; as a receptor of solar energy and a thermal reservoir, it constitutes the working fluid of a heat engine that transports and redistributes matter and energy over the entire globe. The atmosphere is also a major temporary repository of a number of chemical elements that move in a cyclic manner between the hydrosphere, atmosphere, and the upper lithosphere.
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3.3: Origin and Evolution of the Atmosphere
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The atmosphere of the Earth (and also of Venus and Mars) is generally believed to have its origin in relatively volatile compounds that were incorporated into the solids from which these planets accreted.
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3.4: General Circulation
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3.5: Atmospheric Composition
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The atmosphere consists mostly of dry air - mostly molecular nitrogen (78%), molecular oxygen (21%), and Argon (0.9%) - and highly variable amounts of water vapor (from parts per million in air to a few percent). Now we will consider gases and particles in the atmosphere at trace levels. The most abundant of the trace gases in the global atmosphere is carbon dioxide (~400 parts per million), but there are thousands of trace gases with fractions much less than a few parts per million.
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3.6: Biogeochemical reactions in the troposphere
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3.7: Atmospheric deposition
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3.8: Biogeochemical reactions in the stratosphere
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3.9: Models
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Climate models are tools used in climate research. They are attempts to synthesize our theoretical and empirical knowledge of the climate system in a computer code. This chapter describes how climate models are constructed, and how they are evaluated, and it discusses some applications.
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3.10: Impacts
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Climate change impacts not only physical but also biological and human systems. Possible impacts of future climate change are important considerations for current decision making, but they are associated with uncertainties. In this chapter we will discuss future projections with climate models, the main sources of uncertainty for those projections, and some global scale impacts.
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3.11: Summary
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