EOSC 112 Lecture 1: AtmosphericCirc1_Fall2014_post

• School: UBC
• Department: Earth and Ocean Sciences
• Course: EOSC 112
• Professor: Roger Francois

Document Summary

After today"s class, see if you can start from the sun and logically develop earth"s general atmospheric circulation, imagining an earth without continents (continents complicate things). There is only one small leap-of-faith in the whole process; everything else flows from what you already know. Here"s what you should already know: the earth is (almost) a sphere, the earth rotates from west to east (the sun rises in the east, right, the tropics are warmer than the poles, hot air rises. The only part of the process that you are unlikely to develop from these things you know is that our planet, given our particular size and rate of rotation, ends up with three wind bands in each hemisphere. Jupiter, which is much larger and spins faster, has many more wind bands in each hemisphere. Venus, which is about our size but rotates much slower, has only one.