why does it get COLDER as you get CLOSER to the SUN?

Question

like when you go higher it gets colder. For example, outside an aeroplane or on mount Everest
*i thought the sun was hot..?*
any ideas?

Answer 1

You are about as close to the sun in our high atmosphere as you are on th surface of the Earth. However, you are much further from the surface of our warm planet. You can model this like a boundary value problem, with a very low temperature of space at some reasonable radius and the surface temperature of the Earth at some lower radius. You end up with a negative lapse rate (approximately, as it is only nearly linear in the troposphere).

Answer 2

As you get closer to the sun it gets warmer, but as you move away from the Earth you'll get colder. That's because the earth has an atmosphere and that helps keep the planet warm (greenhouse gases) by trapping a lot of radiation from the sun. If there weren't an atmosphere the temperatures of the Earth would be hundreds of degrees cooler. And even without the greenhouse effect, there is a lot of heat from the center of the Earth due to gravity creating pressure and friction and the like.

But if you were out in space it would get warmer as you got closer to the sun. Or if you were to go up a mountain at night it would get colder faster than if you went up a mountain in the daytime. Not colder as in lower temperature, but colder meaning it would have a larger differential or drop in temperature.

Answer 3

Actually you're not getting closer to the sun. Going up in height you're getting closer to space and the air is less dense the higher up in the atmosphere you go.

The temperature of the air is determined by the density of the air around you. The energy coming from the sun is fairly constant, and heat is generated by molecules colliding with each other and releasing some of the energy of the collisions as heat.

The more dense a substance the less energy it takes to heat it up to a specific temperature using a constant amount of energy because the molecules don't have to travel very far to find another molecule to collide with.

Now when you get into the upper atmosphere the density drops drastically, and with the given amount of energy coming from the sun the molecules have to travel further to find another molecule to collide with and generate heat.

So if you want to make it approximately room temperature up in the upper atmosphere, you'd have to really increase the energy input from the sun to accomplish this.

That's basically why some people might ask you which kind of burn is more severe to get, 100 C water or 100 C steam?

The answer is the steam because the molecules are much more spaced apart in steam than in water and you'd have to put a lot more energy into the steam to heat it up to 100 C than you would with water.

So in nutshell that's why it gets colder the higher you go on the earth, it isn't that it gets colder the closer you get to the sun, it's just the density of the air is much lower than on the ground.

Answer 4

First of all, you're not much closer to the sun.
It's true that by climbing a mountain, you might get a little closer to the sun, but that's like taking a step to the west and claiming I'm closer to Hawaii. Technically true.....but......

A much bigger factor that comes into play is how thin the air is, and how close to the ground you are. As the sun is collected on the ground, it heats the earth. The earth then heats the air. So if you're way up in the air you're actually farther from your heat source, the ground.
As air spreads out, it cools off due to thermodynamics. The explanation for that is technically complex, so I'll spare you. But if thick air near the ground rises to where the pressure is lower and it expands and gets thinner, it cools off a great deal because of thermodynamic principles.

Answer 5

The warmth you feel is mostly due to warmth trapped by the atmosphere (the air warms and that warms your body). As you move higher in the atmosphere, there is less air, and so less held warmth, so it gets colder.

Of course, in moving from the surface of the earth to the top of Mt Everest, you've ascended 26,000 ft or so, or about 0.00000053% of the distance to the sun. If you were to move SIGNIFICANTLY closer to the sun (say, Mercury) than things will heat up signficantly!

Answer 6

A season is a branch of the 3 hundred and sixty 5 days, marked with the aid of adjustments in climate, ecology, and hours of daylight hours. Seasons result from the once a year revolution of the Earth around the sunlight and the lean of the Earth's axis relative to the airplane of revolution. In temperate and polar areas, the seasons are marked with the aid of adjustments interior the intensity of sunlight that reaches the Earth's floor, adjustments of which will reason animals to bypass into hibernation or emigrate, and flora to be dormant.

Answer 7

The effect of getting closer to the sun when you go up in altitude is very small because your relative distance to the sun changes very little (much less than 1%). The biggest factor is the decreasing density of the atmosphere and having less atmosphere above you to trap heat (i.e. less greenhouse effect).

Answer 8

The relationship between temperature and pressure is the scientific way to describe why you get cooler as you go up in elevation. If one goes up, the other goes up as well. If one goes down, the other goes down also. Thus, when pressure decreases (like when you travel to higher elevations) so does temperature.