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Research Over Tibet Gives Climate Insight
An anonymous reader writes "NASA is reporting that researchers have discovered thunderstorms above Tibet offer a direct path for water vapor and chemicals to move from the lower atmosphere to the stratosphere. From the article: ' Learning how water vapor reaches the stratosphere can help improve climate prediction models. Similarly, understanding the pathways that ozone-depleting chemicals can take to reach the stratosphere is essential for understanding future threats to the ozone layer, which shields Earth from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.'"
Wow. I don't even really know what to say to this.
In the troposphere, while it's typically pretty stable, there are cases where it is unstable and particularly strong convection occurs. One case of particularly strong upward motion is supercell thunderstorms. But the upward motion tends to slow and stop at or slightly above the tropopause. Temperature decreases with height in the troposphere, but increases with height in the stratosphere. While momentum carries strong updrafts into the very lower troposphere, even the air in the strongest updrafts don't continue very far before descending again.
In other words, there's not a whole lot of mass exchange occurring between the troposphere and stratosphere.
Understanding this exchange and the sources and sinks of water vapor and other chemicals in the stratosphere is one way to better improve our study of things in the stratosphere.
And you greatly overestimate the accuracy of any numerical model on a computer. It is very impressive, given the large amount of parameterizations and approximations made, that computer models produce as good of output and forecast the weather as well as they do.
Sounds like good news either way to a Distributist like me. Industrialization has just been one long transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, hidden behind cheap goods made available by economies of scale. This will repair itself about the same time that Cottage Industry and small-scale production starts up again because long-haul shipping will disappear.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
AGW appears to be drying out Tibet. The number of people in those watersheds is frightening.
(Sorry to post as a reply, but I can't find the frigging "top level reply" link on the article page for some reason...)
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
I mean, it turns out that Tibet even provides a path to the heavens for water vapor!