The half-order energy balance equation – Part 1: The homogeneous HEBE and long memories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. The original Budyko–Sellers type of 1D energy balance models (EBMs) consider the Earth system averaged over long times and apply the continuum mechanics heat equation. When these and the more phenomenological box models are extended to include time-varying anomalies, they have a key weakness: neither model explicitly nor realistically treats the conductive–radiative surface boundary condition that is necessary for a correct treatment of energy storage. In this first of a two-part series, I apply standard Laplace and Fourier techniques to the continuum mechanics heat equation, solving it with the correct radiative–conductive boundary conditions and obtaining an equation directly for the surface temperature anomalies in terms of the anomalous forcing. Although classical, this equation is half-ordered and not integer-ordered: the half-order energy balance equation (HEBE). A quite general consequence is that although Newton's law of cooling holds, the heat flux across surfaces is proportional to a half-ordered (not first-ordered) time derivative of the surface temperature. This implies that the surface heat flux has a long memory, that it depends on the entire previous history of the forcing, and that the temperature–heat flux relationship is no longer instantaneous. I then consider the case in which the Earth is periodically forced. The classical case is diurnal heat forcing; I extend this to annual conductive–radiative forcing and show that the surface thermal impedance is a complex valued quantity equal to the (complex) climate sensitivity. Using a simple semi-empirical model of the forcing, I show how the HEBE can account for the phase lag between the summer maximum forcing and maximum surface temperature Earth response. In Part 2, I extend all these results to spatially inhomogeneous forcing and to the full horizontally inhomogeneous problem with spatially varying specific heats, diffusivities, advection velocities, and climate sensitivities. I consider the consequences for macroweather (monthly, seasonal, interannual) forecasting and climate projections.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".