Earth's lower atmosphere is expanding due to climate change

[Admin]

The rate of atmospheric expansion has increased since the first measurements in the 1980s.

Earth's lower atmosphere is expanding due to climate change : Read more

 

[Pogo]

Makes sense, it gets warmer, the air gets bigger.

 

[Catastrophe]

How do you measure the height of the troposphere to within "roughly 164 feet (50 meters) per decade"?

I would have thought that it varied that much locally (within a few miles) over the surface of the Earth, at any given time.
What is the marker of such a division?

Also, Pogo, why does the heat not leak outwards and normalise the boundary as the troposphere cools (whatever this boundary may be)?


Cat

 

[Pogo]

Heat transfer rate, as I learned in Navy nuclear power school, is Qdot=UAdeltaT. I imagine it could apply to the troposphere to stratosphere interface to some extant. Where U is the heat transfer rate per unit area, this wouldn’t change. A is area, square kilometers, which would change slightly. Delta T is temperature change. As the troposphere warms, increased delta T would allow for increased heat leakage to the sky. But, in order to support increased heat transfer rate, the future temperature must reach a new steady state slightly higher in order to maintain the increased heat loss. Sorta like if an object has an internal heat source and it produces more heat, the surface temperature must increase in order to blow off the increased heat flow.
In reference to how they know where the interface is and how they measure it, no idea. I knew that the troposphere to stratosphere is a fairly narrow interface, don’t know how or why ( logic dictates it would be a smooth transition from ground to space), but I didn’t know it was that well defined that it could be measured in meters or feet.

OK, I just skimmed troposphere at Wikipedia, it can vary from 6 km to 18 km, so it seems weird that they can measure the increase to meters or feet.

 

[Atlan0001]

And when Earth and Earth's atmosphere gets smacked by the output of solar storms (solar flares) or other extraterrestrial, including extra-solar systemic (such as our system's drifts north-south / south-north (so to speak) through the quite cosmic dusty and ray-ed galactic disk), phenomena? I've read before that Sol's sphere might regularly expand and contract to some degree in drifting (in passing) perpendicularly through it. And, of course, any such minor event effecting Sol would be a major event effecting Earth and Earth's atmosphere.

Just another little monkey wrench thrown into the works of an improbable perfectly, scientifically, balanced Utopia of Sol, Earth, and Mankind.