c. What is Earth\'s peak surface radiation wavelength? 23. The climate system ha
ID: 289001 • Letter: C
Question
c. What is Earth's peak surface radiation wavelength? 23. The climate system has a number of different feedbacks, both positive and negative, and they are far too complex to go into all of them here. However, the ice albedo effect is very easy to understand. a. Does clean ice have a high or a low albedo? b. If climate cools and glaciers grow, will Earth's albedo increase or decrease? c. How will that change in albedo modify Earth's energy budget? d. Will this new energy budget cause glaciers to grow or shrink? e. Explain why this is considered feedback. Recall that positive feedback is an amplification of a change that has already happened, and a negative feedback dampens or diminishes the change. Is the ice albedo effect a positive or a negative feedback? f.Explanation / Answer
23. a Albedo is the unitless quantity that measure how much well a surface reflects solar radiation. Since black surface absorbs more energy and reflects little energy. Therefore clean ice have a high albedo because it will be more transparent and hence will reflect more sunlight than dirty snow.
b. If climate cools and glaciers will grow the albedo of earth will increase because there will be more surface area occupied by the ice so it will reflect more sunlight and hence albedo of earth will increase.
c. Earth's energy budget is the balance betTween the incoming energy recieved by the earth and the outgoing radiation into the outer space. Earth's energy budget depends on various factors like albedo, atmospheric composition, vegetation, landcover and cloud cover. When the albedo of a surface is high eg snow it will reflect more sunlight into the outer space. Whereas when the albedo of a surface is low eg. bare land surface it will absorb more heat and reflect less sunlight which result in slight fluctuations of the energy budget of the earth.
f. Ice albedo is a positive effect since the change in the area occupied by ice, glaciers, sea ice also changes the albedo. This change in albedo of the ice will tend to reinforce the initial change in the area of the ice. When there is more ice cover the albedo of the surface will increase and it will tend to reflect more sunlight into the outer space. Since there is more reflection of sunlight and less absorption which results in more cooling and more ice will form. So the initial change in the ice area will tend to reinforce the change and we can say that it is a positive effect.
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