File talk:Greenhouse Effect.svg

One-way heat device?

In File:Greenhouse_Effect.svg the atmosphere is shown as radiating 324W/m2 downwards, but only 195W/m2 upwards. If we are to assume that this radiation arises from the troposphere 'glowing' at IR wavelengths due to the action of greenhouse gases, how come the radiation is asymmetric? That doesn't seem to fit with known laws of heat radiation. --Anteaus (talk) 00:11, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Update to graphic being considered

I am considering updating the existing graphic to an svg version of this:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_1bQMExrKjaY4x2492fZ-j9VgoE4rkbm/view?usp=share_link

Advantages over existing diagram:

• Uses updated numbers from 2015
• Net absorbed (global warming) is included and easy to understand, since incoming and outgoing energy flows are aggregated
• Evaporation and convection is separated out from surface radiation (before it was just an undescribed color in the radiation arrow)
• Consistent coloring for energy flow types

See Talk:Greenhouse_effect#Further_discussion for background or to join the discussion on these changes. Efbrazil (talk) 16:29, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

@Efbrazil: I like the udpates and improvements, but suggest that the "Net absorbed..." language be moved to the upper portion, maybe upper right, so that the origin of the 240.5-239.9 calculation will be clearer and not isolated below. —RCraig09 (talk) 16:37, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

Separately, maybe the font color of "Thermal radiation from the surface..." could be changed to the same red as the red arrows representing thermal radiation. Color-coding for the win! 16:41 Or if that text is moved up a bit, inside the wide upward-pointing red arrow, the font color could be white inside the red portion of the wide arrow. —RCraig09 (talk) 16:45, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

@RCraig09: Glad you like it! If you can't beat them, join them.

Net absorbed is the Earth though, not space, so arguably it belongs there. You can also do the math and see that it applies to the Earth energy flows, in terms of 163.3+340.3-104.8-398.2 = 0.6. I also like it at the bottom as a sort of "concluding thought", and it fits nicely. I thought about changing the label to Net absorbed: 240.5-239.9 = 0.6 W/m², but then you lose the (global warming) parenthetical, plus I'm hesitant to start adding and subtracting the values, as several of them don't add up right due to off by 0.1 issues due to rounding (not by me, but by the source graphic).

As for "Thermal radiation from surface", it's kind of the same thing- I see your points, but I think they're outweighed by the advantages of how it is now. All text is black or white; the background color is where the color coding is, not the fonts. Making the text red then begs the question of why other text isn't color coded, like "thermal radiation emitted into space".

As for moving the text into the arrow, I tried that but it really doesn't work. You need to wrap it too much to stuff it in the arrow, plus you lose most of the color gradient so you can have the white text against dark red. An advantage of how things are now is that the location pairs up nicely with the Evaporation and convection up arrow text, so you can see the two mechanisms for surface heat loss side by side. Efbrazil (talk) 18:28, 13 May 2023 (UTC)