Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Water vapor can also be indirect evidence supporting the presence of extraterrestrial liquid water in the case of some planetary mass objects. Water vapor, which reacts to temperature changes, is referred to as a 'feedback', because it amplifies the effect of forces that initially cause the warming. Therefore, it is a greenhouse gas. [2]
Atmospheric pressure decreases with altitude, so the rising air expands in a process that expends energy and causes the air to cool, which makes water vapor condense into cloud. [8] Water vapor in saturated air is normally attracted to condensation nuclei such as dust and salt particles that are small enough to be held aloft by normal ...
Climate change increases the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere due to the Clausius–Clapeyron relation, in what is known as the water-vapor feedback. [23] It also affects a range of cloud properties, such as their height, the typical distribution throughout the atmosphere, and cloud microphysics , such as the amount of water droplets ...
= ratio molecular weight of water vapor/dry air = 0.622. Both and are constants. Since atmospheric pressure, P, depends upon altitude, so does . At higher altitude water evaporates and boils at lower temperature.
The boiling point of water is the temperature at which the saturated vapor pressure equals the ambient pressure. Water supercooled below its normal freezing point has a higher vapor pressure than that of ice at the same temperature and is, thus, unstable. Calculations of the (saturation) vapor pressure of water are commonly used in meteorology.
Atmospheric thermodynamics is the study of heat-to-work transformations (and their reverse) that take place in the Earth's atmosphere and manifest as weather or climate. . Atmospheric thermodynamics use the laws of classical thermodynamics, to describe and explain such phenomena as the properties of moist air, the formation of clouds, atmospheric convection, boundary layer meteorology, and ...
The vapor then condenses into tiny water droplets which freeze if the temperature is low enough. These millions of tiny water droplets and/or ice crystals form the contrails. The time taken for the vapor to cool enough to condense accounts for the contrail forming some distance behind the aircraft.
Water vapor that is able to make it through the cold trap eventually rises to the top of the stratosphere, where it undergoes photodissociation into oxygen and hydrogen or hydroxide ions and hydrogen. [16] [17] This hydrogen is then able to escape the atmosphere. Thus, in some sense, the tropical tropopause layer cold trap is what prevents ...