Statistics
Scientific paper
Apr 2003
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003eaeja.....1598l&link_type=abstract
EGS - AGU - EUG Joint Assembly, Abstracts from the meeting held in Nice, France, 6 - 11 April 2003, abstract #1598
Statistics
Scientific paper
Planetary climates are fluid systems held out of equilibrium by an uneven input of solar energy. The temperature gradients thus produced are mitigated by the transport of heat by the atmosphere and oceans, as sensible and latent heat, and there is evidence that climates select that heat transport which maximizes the work output (equivalently, in a steady state, dissipation) or entropy production. This MEP principle appears to hold for Earth, Mars and Titan - bodies in widely different temperature and dynamical regimes. The MEP state is one which offers the richest number of combinations of different heat transfer modes. On Earth and Mars, ocean currents and the CO_2 frost cycle respectively act as low-dissipation heat transports without which the system could not realise its optimum. Titan"s thick atmosphere can easily transport heat in a "less efficient" way than Earth: fluctuating windspeeds must therefore act to soak up the available work. Information is created when the fluid properties are insufficiently dissipative to destroy the work created by the efficient transport of heat. The inpredictability of weather on Earth is not necessarily due to chaotic divergence from an imperfectly determined state but rather the creation of new information. In this regard, the inefficient Mars atmosphere is rather predictable. A general principle such as MEP must be scale-free, suggesting a connection with self-organized criticality (SOC) and 1/f statistics. The terrestrial climate has, in the broadest sense, a 1/f fluctuation power spectrum although the spectrum is somewhat kinked in that the long time constant of the ocean shifts some power from short timescales to longer ones. It may be expected that similar spectra will be seen elsewhere, with the total power corresponding to the maximum possible for the radiative setting.
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