Global energy and water cycle (in the atmosphere and the hydrosphere)

(Presentation material)

Here are materials that I often use for lectures on the subject. Specifically, these were used for presentation at seminars at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, May 2004. The content is almost the same as my part of the lecture "Earth System Science" at Shonan Fujisawa Campus, Keio University.

They are intended as aids of lecture and not as stand-alone texts. By that context and by limitation of the size of the screen, sentences as well as references are sometimes incomplete. I prepared them to be projected on a screen with a notebook computer and "MagicPoint" software. Then I converted them into HTML format and put here. Because of limitation of the combination of software and fonts, superscripts and subscripts in mathmatical formula are not properly shown. They are either expressed with expression using "^" and "_", or simply with normal size fonts.

I omitted some of the figures in the presentation from this HTML version, in order to avoid violation of copyrights. The figures I included are figures produced by myself and figures which I am confident that they are in public domain.

Contents

• What part of the earth are we talking about?
• Conservation laws, conservation of mass, mass of water and air
• Earth radiation budget
• Energy balance of atmosphere and surface (vertical 1-dimensional)
• Atmospheric circulation and energy transport
• Ocean's role in the global energy and water cycle [brief]
• Land's role in the global energy and water cycle
  • Seasonal cycle of temperature and surface energy balance
  • Monsoons
  • Vegetation of climate [brief]
  • Seasonal cycle of water balance in large river basins
• Cryosphere (snow and ice)
• Some factors causing variation of global energy and water cycle: Greenhouse effect, reflectivity (albedo); feedbacks, delay [brief]

[Masuda's documents on hydroclimate] [Masuda's top page in English] [Masuda's "Home" page]