Atmospheric Circulation Quotes

Wind is God's way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it's hotter to areas where it's cooler. That's what wind is.

As Earth's climate changes, we can expect more destructive hurricanes. As sea level and surface temperatures rise, more solar energy is trapped in the atmosphere, revving up the hydrological cycle of evaporation and precipitation and sometimes manifesting in terrifying storms.

Much remains to be learned about stratospheric chemistry - and, in more general terms, about the physics and chemistry of the global atmosphere.

Neptune's unusual behavior is showing us that though we can make great models of planetary atmospheric circulation, there may be key pieces missing.

The sea is the source of water and the source of wind; for neither would blasts of wind arise in the clouds and blow out from within them, except for the great sea, nor would the streams of rivers nor the rain-water in the sky exist but for the sea ; but the great sea is the begetter of clouds and winds and rivers.

What most people know but don't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn't there, we'd be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.

It's a pretty widely-accepted notion that the atmosphere is a ridiculously complex system, and the best we can do with our models is a rough approximation.

The oxygen cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the carbon cycle, the water cycle - all of these are linked to the existence of life in the sea.

The atmosphere is the key symbol of global interdependence.

I live on the West Coast of the United States, and yet the air that I breathe is sometimes the same air that was being breathed in China the day before.

Listen to it, and you are hearing the mighty currents of the air rushing down the latitudes of the earth, currents from the Mackenzie and the Athabasca and the Saskatchewan, and from the prairies and the white Tundra. It is a homeless wind, forever on the move.

The jet stream is the controlling influence over the world's weather systems.

The global climate is a complex interactive system, with all kinds of nonlinear feedback loops.

Weather systems are natural heat engines, and like all other heat engines, both natural and artificial, they are driven not by temperature per se, but by differences in temperature between one location and another.

The science linking the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather to the climate crisis has matured tremendously in the last couple of years.

I know: If you're looking down at Earth, you're looking through an atmosphere that has a bit of haze in many places and not just occasional clouds.

To know the laws that govern the winds, and to know that you know them, will give you an easy mind on your voyage round the world; otherwise you may tremble at the appearance of every cloud.

Air is traditionally 'thin,' but the more we learn about our atmosphere, the more substantial it becomes. In some places it is so filled with inorganic flotsam that it is almost thick enough to plough; in others, it has become so primed with the by-products of life that it comes close to being a living tissue in its own right.

The eye of the hurricane forms as air rotates up and out of the hurricane and some of the air that's being spun out of the top of the storm sinks back into the center. This keeps the eye of the storm relatively calm and clear.

Wind ought to be a verb or an adverb. It isn't really anything. It's a manner of movement of warmth and cold: a kind of information system of the air.

The equatorial line is, in fact, the centre of atmospheric motion.

The key thing to understand is that solar activity causes shifts in the jet stream with consequent changes in weather patterns and triggers processes that lead to storm formation.

The winds that blow through the wide sky in these mounts, the winds that sweep from Canada to Mexico, from the Pacific to the Atlantic - have always blown on free men.

Sandy was particularly destructive because it was prevented from moving back out to sea by a "blocking pattern" associated with the jet stream. There's debate about this, but one recent study suggested that melting sea ice in the Arctic may lead to such blocking.

The cloud never comes from the quarter of the horizon from which we watch for it.