What the ground is at, once the air over it has been counted, Kelvin.
The equilibrium temperature is the temperature of a bare rock in that orbit, and on any body with a real atmosphere it is not the temperature of anything: Venus radiates at 232 K and its surface is at 737. That factor of three is the whole difference between a world whose poles hold frost and a world with a lead-melting equator, and a cover field that reads the equilibrium figure puts an ice cap on Venus.
The form is fitted rather than derived — a radiative-convective solution needs the composition, and the generator does not have one — to the three bodies where both numbers are measured: Mars is 213 K over 220 kg/m² of air and 210 K on the ground, Earth 263 over 10,200 and 288, Venus 310 over 1.0 × 10⁶ and 737. The fourth power is what makes it ignore Mars and dominate Venus, which is the shape the real curve has: greenhouse forcing is logarithmic in column mass per band and the bands saturate and widen, so the effect accelerates once the atmosphere is optically thick everywhere.
- equilibriumnumber
- Undocumented
- airMassnumber
- Undocumented