Atmosphere
The lower atmosphere also typically contains a boundary between two distinct regions (the troposphere and stratosphere), but that boundary (the tropopause) displays quite different behavior. However, atmospheric thermoclines, or inversions, can occur, e.g. as nighttime cooling of the Earth's surface produces cold, dense, often calm air adjacent to the ground. The coldest air is next to the ground, with air temperature increasing with height. At the top of this nighttime boundary layer (which may be only a hundred meters) the normal adiabatic temperature profile of the troposphere (i.e. temperature decreasing with altitude) is again observed. The thermocline or inversion layer occurs where the temperature profile changes from positive to negative with increasing height. The stability of the night time inversion is usually destroyed soon after sunrise as the sun's energy warms the ground, which warms the air in the inversion layer. The warmer, less dense air then rises, destroying the stability that characterizes the nightly inversion.
This phenomenon was first applied to the field of noise pollution study in the 1960s, contributing to the design of urban highways and noise barriers.
Read more about this topic: Thermocline
Famous quotes containing the word atmosphere:
“The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)