Abstract
Abstract. The residence time of energy in a planetary atmosphere, τ, which was recently introduced and computed for the Earth's atmosphere (Osácar et al., 2020), is here extended to the atmospheres of Venus, Mars and Titan. τ is the timescale for the energy transport across the atmosphere. In the cases of Venus, Mars and Titan, these computations are lower bounds due to a lack of some energy data. If the analogy between τ and the solar Kelvin–Helmholtz scale is assumed, then τ would also be the time the atmosphere needs to return to equilibrium after a global thermal perturbation.
Highlights
When the inflow, Fi, of any substance into a box is equal to the outflow, Fo, the amount of that substance in the box, M, is constant
In this work we extend the substance that flows in the box from matter to energy, and the residence time is where E is the total energy in the box, and F is the energy flux that enters or leaves it
In Stix (2003) it is shown that the Kelvin– Helmholtz timescale (KH) corresponds to both the time that a photon takes from the core until it leaves the surface and the time necessary for the star to return to equilibrium after a global perturbation
Summary
Fi, of any substance into a box is equal to the outflow, Fo, the amount of that substance in the box, M, is constant. This constitutes an equilibrium or steady state. Planetary atmospheres constitute steady-state problems, because the storage of energy in their interior is not systematically increasing or decreasing. Several authors have previously considered the energy–residence-time relation in other types of problems (Mcilveen, 1992, 2010; Harte, 1988). The structure of this communication is the following: Sect.
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