Atmospheric thermodynamics is the study of heat to work transformations (and the reverse) in the earth’s atmospheric system in relation to weather or climate. Following the fundamental laws of classical thermodynamics, atmospheric thermodynamics studies such phenomena as properties of moist air, formation of clouds, atmospheric convection, boundary layer meteorology, and vertical stabilities in the atmosphere. Atmospheric thermodynamic diagrams are used as tools in the forecasting of storm development. Atmospheric thermodynamics forms a basis for cloud microphysics and convection parameterizations in numerical weather models, and is used in many climate considerations, including convective-equilibrium climate models.
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“Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks the wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)