Correct option is A
The correct answer is (a).
Introduction
A temperature inversion is an anomalous meteorological condition where the normal atmospheric lapse rate is reversed.
Instead of air cooling with increasing altitude, a layer of warmer air traps cooler air near the Earth's surface, acting like an impenetrable lid for vertical air movement.
Information Booster
- Under normal tropospheric conditions, air temperature steadily decreases with altitude, allowing warm, polluted surface air to rise and disperse.
- During an inversion, the cooler, denser air at the surface is trapped beneath a warmer aloft layer, completely halting atmospheric convection and vertical mixing.
- Radiation inversions are common on clear, calm winter nights when the ground rapidly loses heat, cooling the air immediately above it.
- Subsidence inversions occur in high-pressure systems when descending air masses compress and warm aloft.
- Inversions are notorious for trapping primary pollutants and facilitating the photochemical reactions that create severe smog.
- The Great Smog of London in 1952, which killed thousands, was directly caused by a prolonged, intense temperature inversion trapping domestic coal smoke.
- Option B describes an isothermal layer, a rare and usually thin atmospheric band where temperature remains constant with height, which is not an inversion.
- Option C describes the standard, normal environmental lapse rate in the troposphere, where temperature decreases as altitude increases.
- Option D describes an unstable, fluctuating atmospheric profile, not the distinct, stable boundary layer characteristic of a thermal inversion.
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