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7: Applications of Atmospheric Radiation Principles

  • Page ID
    3396
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    Learning Objectives

    By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:

    • demonstrate the effects of infrared absorbers on Earth’s temperature using a simple model
    • explain the concept of radiative–convective equilibrium
    • determine what a satellite is seeing by interpreting the observed spectrum of upwelling infrared radiation

    Now that you are familiar with the principles of atmospheric radiation, we can apply them to help us better understand weather and climate. Climate is related to weather, but the concepts used in predicting climate are very different from those used to predict weather.

    Thumbnail: GOES-15 (GOES-West Backup) image of Western U.S. Infrared. (Public Domain; NOAA).


    This page titled 7: Applications of Atmospheric Radiation Principles is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by William Brune (John A. Dutton: e-Education Institute) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.