Climatology Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Correct answer: biosphere

The five are the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere. The biosphere belongs among them because living matter exchanges carbon, water and energy with the others on climatically important timescales - through photosynthesis and respiration, through transpiration, and through the albedo and roughness of vegetated surfaces. The ionosphere, magnetosphere and exosphere lie outside the system as usually defined.

Answer: B

Correct answer: A-2, B-4, C-1, D-3

Response time rises with heat capacity and with how slowly each reservoir is stirred. The atmosphere adjusts in days to weeks; the ocean mixed layer, being stirred by the wind but far more massive, in months to a few years; the deep ocean, ventilated only slowly, in centuries to a millennium; and the great ice sheets in thousands of years. That spread is why the system is never in equilibrium with its forcing.

Answer: C

Both are true and the reason gives the significance: heat taken up by the deep ocean delays the surface response to a forcing, so the full effect of a change is not seen for a very long time. Heat capacity is the reason.

Answer: D

The first two are correct. The third is quite wrong, and the spread of timescales over six orders of magnitude is one of the defining features of the system. Fast and slow must be modelled together. Six orders of magnitude separate the extremes.

Answer: A

Correct answer: the statistics of weather over time

Weather is the state of the atmosphere now and climate is the distribution from which that state is drawn - the means, the variability and the extremes over a period conventionally taken as thirty years. The distinction matters because a single cold winter says nothing about the distribution, and a shift in the distribution is detectable long before any individual day becomes impossible.

Answer: B

Climate is a statistical description and individual seasons vary widely about the mean. Only a trend over many years carries information about the climate itself. Variability is expected. One season carries almost no information at all.

Answer: C

Volcanic aerosol, orbital changes and solar variability are the natural examples, and greenhouse gas emissions the anthropogenic one. Internal variability by contrast needs no forcing at all. Solar and volcanic are the natural cases.

Answer: D

Correct answer: A-2, B-4, C-1, D-3

Two questions separate these: is the cause outside the climate system, and on what timescale does it act. Orbital changes are external and act over tens of thousands of years. Volcanic aerosol is external and lasts a few years, until it settles out of the stratosphere. Greenhouse gas emission is external and anthropogenic. El Nino is not a forcing at all - it is the coupled system rearranging heat within itself.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A

Both are true and the reason gives the mechanism. The ocean and atmosphere are coupled non-linear fluids with their own modes of oscillation, so the system can move from one state to another with no push from outside - El Nino being the clearest case. This is why detecting a forced trend requires an estimate of the internal variability against which to judge it.

Answer: B

The ice albedo feedback is the standard example, where melting ice exposes darker surface and absorbs more sunlight. Positive does not mean good, and it does not necessarily mean runaway. Ice albedo is the standard illustration.