Post by account_disabled on Mar 4, 2024 22:43:41 GMT -5
Unless you run barefoot, you perceive heat waves through the air temperature. In most cases, this is how scientists detect them as well. “Heat extremes have always been studied based on air temperature, in part because we have many measurements of it,” such as those from weather stations, says Almudena García-García, a scientist who analyzes the Earth system in the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research (Germany).
But how heat waves spread over the ground has been much less researched. This proliferation of high temperatures would have important consequences for the complex natural systems that generate our food, pro Chinese Overseas Asia Number Data ess water and even capture carbon. At some point, warming land surfaces would contribute to raising air temperatures , in a kind of twisted climate feedback loop.
Extreme heat on the earth's surface
At the end of last month, García-García published some worrying results on soil thermal extremes in Central Europe in the journal Nature Climate Change . The team collected data from to on air temperatures up to two meters (about six feet) from the surface and temperatures in the same regions in the first centimeters (or four inches) of the ground. At two-thirds of the nearly measuring stations they accessed, heat extremes were increasingly more pronounced on the Earth's surface than in the air. Each decade, these extremes increased by degrees Celsius on the ground compared to the air. The number of days when the earth experienced extreme temperatures increased twice as fast.
“This study opens many questions, because we now know that there are differences between the evolution of heat extremes on the surface and in the air,” says García-García. “Perhaps the difference between the evolution of heat episodes in the soil, vegetation and air will help us understand or predict agricultural failures, alterations in biodiversity or any other impact of climate change on ecosystem activities” .
The complex thing about the Earth's surface is that no two areas in the world are the same . One may have a higher clay or sand content; another more carbon from plants, and one place will be darker than another and thereby absorb more solar energy. In some places, such as an Amazon rainforest, trees block almost all the sunlight that reaches the surface, but in a grassland, the sparse vegetation would let in more photons. In the extreme north or south, the sun crosses the terrain at different angles than at the equator. The topology varies greatly, from completely flat to mountainous. The water table may be higher in one place and lower in another. Different microbial communities swarm in each soil, as do different invertebrates, such as earthworms and insects. All of these variables combine to determine how the surface will warm as the sun rises above the local horizon.
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Farmers have always been concerned about soil temperature: if they don't plant their crops at the right time, the seeds won't germinate. “The old saying among farmers here is that if you can comfortably keep your bare butt on the surface for about seconds, it's warm enough to plant,” says Andrew Margenot, a soil scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who He was not involved in the new study. "Now it's used as a joke, but people figured it out when they didn't have such sophisticated tools."
Today, those tools include sensor networks, which have proliferated as prices for instruments to measure temperature and humidity have plummeted, as well as improved modeling. If you know the properties of the soil, recent rainfall figures, and the ambient air temperature in a given area, it is possible to calculate with reasonable accuracy how that surface will be heated.
But how heat waves spread over the ground has been much less researched. This proliferation of high temperatures would have important consequences for the complex natural systems that generate our food, pro Chinese Overseas Asia Number Data ess water and even capture carbon. At some point, warming land surfaces would contribute to raising air temperatures , in a kind of twisted climate feedback loop.
Extreme heat on the earth's surface
At the end of last month, García-García published some worrying results on soil thermal extremes in Central Europe in the journal Nature Climate Change . The team collected data from to on air temperatures up to two meters (about six feet) from the surface and temperatures in the same regions in the first centimeters (or four inches) of the ground. At two-thirds of the nearly measuring stations they accessed, heat extremes were increasingly more pronounced on the Earth's surface than in the air. Each decade, these extremes increased by degrees Celsius on the ground compared to the air. The number of days when the earth experienced extreme temperatures increased twice as fast.
“This study opens many questions, because we now know that there are differences between the evolution of heat extremes on the surface and in the air,” says García-García. “Perhaps the difference between the evolution of heat episodes in the soil, vegetation and air will help us understand or predict agricultural failures, alterations in biodiversity or any other impact of climate change on ecosystem activities” .
The complex thing about the Earth's surface is that no two areas in the world are the same . One may have a higher clay or sand content; another more carbon from plants, and one place will be darker than another and thereby absorb more solar energy. In some places, such as an Amazon rainforest, trees block almost all the sunlight that reaches the surface, but in a grassland, the sparse vegetation would let in more photons. In the extreme north or south, the sun crosses the terrain at different angles than at the equator. The topology varies greatly, from completely flat to mountainous. The water table may be higher in one place and lower in another. Different microbial communities swarm in each soil, as do different invertebrates, such as earthworms and insects. All of these variables combine to determine how the surface will warm as the sun rises above the local horizon.
ADVERTISING
Farmers have always been concerned about soil temperature: if they don't plant their crops at the right time, the seeds won't germinate. “The old saying among farmers here is that if you can comfortably keep your bare butt on the surface for about seconds, it's warm enough to plant,” says Andrew Margenot, a soil scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who He was not involved in the new study. "Now it's used as a joke, but people figured it out when they didn't have such sophisticated tools."
Today, those tools include sensor networks, which have proliferated as prices for instruments to measure temperature and humidity have plummeted, as well as improved modeling. If you know the properties of the soil, recent rainfall figures, and the ambient air temperature in a given area, it is possible to calculate with reasonable accuracy how that surface will be heated.