The Earth's Tropopause

In our previous post, we noted that the temperature of the atmosphere does not drop by more than a few degrees Centigrade between altitude 12 km and 18 km. We concluded that altitude 15 km corresponds roughly to the atmosphere's tropopause, and therefore marks the top of its convection cycle. Today we consider if there is any significant heat transfer between the tropopause and the upper atmosphere.

The following graph shows the absorption of long-wave radiation by the seventh 3-km layer of the Earth's atmosphere, from altitude 18 km to 21 km. This line is the same as the 18-km line in our Earth's Atmosphere post. The absorption is typical of a clear day in April, at latitude 30°N. We assume water vapor content is zero, but CO2 concentration remains 330 ppm. We assume air pressure is 160 mbar and temperature is 210 K, or −63°C.



In the seventh layer, absorption by CO2 remains strong. As before, we say our 3-km layer is opaque at a particular wavelength when it absorbs more than 63% of that wavelength, and is transparent otherwise. The seventh 3-km layer is opaque from 14.3 to 15.6 μm, while the sixth layer was opaque to 14.3 to 15.7 μm. The seventh layer will absorb roughly 93% of the heat radiated upwards by the CO2 in the sixth layer.

We note that the actual pressure in the Earth's atmosphere at 18 km is closer to 130 mbar. We calculated atmospheric pressure using our constant-temperature model of atmospheric pressure, and this model starts to be increasingly inaccurate in the cold upper layers of the atmosphere.

When we chose our temperatures, we were looking at this plot and rounding to the nearest 10 K. If you look at the plot yourself, you will see that the minimum temperature varies with latitude, and that the minimum spreads over a large range. We see this variation with latitude and the extent of the minimum in plots like this one also. In the case of 30°N, the temperature minimum extends from roughly 12 km to 22 km. The tropopause is the altitude at which the temperature stops dropping with pressure as it would in adiabatic expansion. Thus the tropopause is not at the altitude of minimum temperature, but rather at the altitude where temperature stops dropping adiabatically with pressure.

We go back to this plot and estimate the tropopause altitude as 9 km at 90°N (the north pole), 12 km at 30°N, and 13 km at 0°N (the equator). Why is the tropopause higher in the tropics? Our model of the greenhouse effect and the atmospheric layers must provide us with an answer to this question.

We look at the water vapor concentration in this plot, we see that we have 10 ppm water vapor concentration up to roughly 9 km at 0°N, 12 km at 30°N, and 13 km at 0°N. As we saw in the fifth layer, water vapor concentration of 10 ppm marks the altitude at which the atmosphere becomes transparent to wavelengths 5 to 9 μm, thus allowing the atmosphere below to radiate these wavelengths into space. Between 12 km and 21 km there is no significant change in the absorption spectrum of the atmosphere. A large body of air rising from 12 km to 21 km will be unable to radiate heat into space as it rises. If it cannot radiate heat, it will not sink, and so we will have no convection. Thus we expect the convection cycle to stop at the altitude where water vapor concentration drops to around 10 ppm, and this is indeed what we observe in the Earth's atmosphere.

There is no significant drop in temperature for at least 10 km above the tropopause. Without a temperature gradient, there can be no heat transport by conduction. There is no significant change in the absorption spectrum as we ascend these 10 km, so each layer of the atmosphere will receive as much heat by radiation from the layers above and below as it radiates back to those same layers. Thus there can be no significant heat transport by radiation either. We have already concluded that convection stops at the tropopause, so we see that there is no significant heat exchange between the tropopause and the atmosphere above it.