describe the role of ocean as modifier of climate
Answers
AMSWER:-
Ocean currents act much like a conveyer belt, transporting warm water and precipitation from the equator toward the poles and cold water from the poles back to the tropics. Thus, currents regulate global climate, helping to counteract the uneven distribution of solar radiation reaching Earth's surface.
The ocean plays a central role in influencing the climate zones that we see on land and act as a climate modifier.
EXPLANATION:
The ocean is critical to heating the earth. While the atmosphere and land areas absorb some sunlight, the ocean absorbs majority of the sun’s spectrum/radiation.
The ocean does not merely accumulate solar radiation, it also facilitates in distributing heat across the globe. When the molecules in water get heated, they interact freely with air in a process which is called as evaporation. Ocean water is continually evaporating, raising the humidity and temperature of surrounding air to form storms and rains which are carried by 'trade winds', usually vast distances. In effect, almost all rain which falls on land begins in the ocean.
The tropics are specifically rainy since heat absorption, and therefore ocean evaporation, is maximum in this region. External of Earth’s equatorial regions, weather patterns are influenced fundamentally by ocean currents. Currents are movements of ocean water in an incessant flow, generated primarily by surface winds; however also partly by salinity gradients, temperature, tides, and Earth’s rotation.
Majority of the current systems usually flow circular in the northern hemisphere and 'counter-clockwise' in southern hemisphere, in circular arrays often touching the coastlines. Ocean currents are like a conveyer belt, transferring precipitation and warm water from the equator towards the poles.
Therefore, sans currents, regional temperatures will be extremely hot at the equator and frosty toward the pole, and very less of Earth’s land would have been inhabitable.