Surface Cooling, Part I

In Day and Night we found that the heat capacity of the atmosphere keeps the Earth warm at night. There are ten tons of air above every square meter of the Earth, and this ten tons has heat capacity 10 MJ/°C. When the atmosphere radiates 200 W/m² into space, which is typical of a clear sky, its average temperature drops by less than 1°C in twelve hours.

The heat capacity of water, meanwhile, keeps a pond warm at night. In a 1-m deep pond, there is a ton of water beneath every square meter of surface, and this ton has heat capacity 4 MJ/°C. If the water surface radiates 80 W/m² into space, which is typical when the sky is clear, this radiation will cool the pond by less than 1°C in twelve hours. The water surface will, of course, be losing more heat by atmospheric convection and by evaporation. But in the ocean, where the top ten meters of water are well-mixed by waves, even a surface loss of 800 W/m² will cool the water by less than 1°C at night.

Here is a twenty-day recording of air and water temperature from an ocean buoy, which we obtained from the National Data Buoy Center. The data is here.



We see that the air temperature varies by 5°C from one week to the next, but by less than 1°C from day to night. The water itself, meanwhile, is hardly affected by the weekly variations, and not at all by the daily variations.

Why, then, does the temperature in Arizona drop by 20°C at night? The surface of Arizona is sand and rocks. These solid, opaque materials transport heat within themselves by conduction alone. During the day, their surfaces get hot. During the night, they cool down. In our next post, we will present the thermal properties of some common surface materials, along with a computer program to calculate how fast these surface materials will cool at night. We will find out whether the thermal properties of sand can explain why the desert is hot in the day and cold at night.