The hotter an object the more it emits in the infrared. What is a planetary energy balance? The amount of energy coming in from the local sun is balanced by the outgoing energy emitted in the infrared.
The energy balance of a planet determines the temperature at the surface. – Naomi, and the rest of the Universe Sandbox teamīalancing Energy to Calculate Temperature What follows is the working documentation for this feature, and should help answer some of the questions you may have. So we needed to respond to changes in the orbit, to incoming star-light, and even let you play around with some of the model parameters themselves.įinally we wanted to representatively illustrate the effect of Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including the changes in temperature that happen when we add more Greenhouse gases to the atmosphere due to human activities. And we wanted something in the spirit of the sandbox, so that you can change other things about the simulation and see the interactions play out. We also needed something simple enough that we could do the calculations in real time. Where it’s cold enough for snow and sea ice, we paint the Earth white. In doing so we wanted something that would give us different temperatures at different latitudes, so we could show the seasons come and go. We’ve added a simple climate simulation to the Earth in Universe Sandbox.
