Earth's Infrared Background
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866908986295451648 |
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| author | Shamir, Ofer Gerber, Edwin P. |
| author_facet | Shamir, Ofer Gerber, Edwin P. |
| contents | Much of the Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) emitted to space is best described as random variability, or the ``Earth's Infrared Background''. A rigorous characterization of this background provides an objective null hypothesis and enables the isolation of atmospheric phenomena -- such as waves, storms, and other coherent structures -- within OLR observations. To this end, we identify the background as isotropic fluctuations implied by the fluctuation-dissipation theorem in response to internal atmospheric variability on small spatiotemporal scales. We use a stochastically forced energy balance climate model, which has a broad sense red spectrum consistent with observations, a first-order process in time, and a second-order process in space. By fitting the model to OLR data from satellite observations, we find that the background fluctuations have an upper bound of about 400~km and 2.5~days on their spatiotemporal (de)correlations, between meso-scale and synoptic-scale weather. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_05288 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Earth's Infrared Background Shamir, Ofer Gerber, Edwin P. Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics Earth and Planetary Astrophysics Geophysics Much of the Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) emitted to space is best described as random variability, or the ``Earth's Infrared Background''. A rigorous characterization of this background provides an objective null hypothesis and enables the isolation of atmospheric phenomena -- such as waves, storms, and other coherent structures -- within OLR observations. To this end, we identify the background as isotropic fluctuations implied by the fluctuation-dissipation theorem in response to internal atmospheric variability on small spatiotemporal scales. We use a stochastically forced energy balance climate model, which has a broad sense red spectrum consistent with observations, a first-order process in time, and a second-order process in space. By fitting the model to OLR data from satellite observations, we find that the background fluctuations have an upper bound of about 400~km and 2.5~days on their spatiotemporal (de)correlations, between meso-scale and synoptic-scale weather. |
| title | Earth's Infrared Background |
| topic | Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics Earth and Planetary Astrophysics Geophysics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05288 |