Troposphere is the lowest layer of the Earth’s atmosphere and accounts for about 75-80% of the atmosphere.
A latest study that ran over decades using weather balloon and satellite data has revealed that human-induced climate change has deeply impacted the planet and the latest from the miseries is that the Earth's Troposphere has been pushed up higher.
Since 2000s, its known to scientists that troposphere is expanding. As troposphere warms up, it pushes upwards a boundary called the Tropopause, which separates the troposphere from the higher, cooler stratosphere. A whole host of natural processes affect this layer, but of course, warming from carbon dioxide emissions is a key driver of the rise.
The satellite observations taken since 2000 verified that the height of the tropopause has increased over the past two decades.
While a higher tropopause and pushing up of troposphere might not be too much to worry about in everyday life, it could increase the severity of thunderstorms, and require planes to fly higher to avoid turbulence.
The location of the tropopause is of interest to commercial pilots who often fly the airplanes in the lower stratosphere to avoid turbulence, and it plays a role in severe thunderstorms, whose overshooting tops sometimes drive the tropopause higher and draw down air from the stratosphere.
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That tropopause region is pushing up the boundary with the stratosphere by about 50-60 meters (about 165-195 feet) every 10 years.
To isolate the role of human-induced warming, the research team applied statistical techniques to account for the impact of natural events that temporarily change atmospheric temperatures and affect the tropopause, such as volcanic eruptions and the periodic warming of surface waters in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean known as El Niño. The analysis of radiosonde observations showed that the tropopause has increased in height at a steady pace since 1980, that is about 58-59 meters per decade, of which 50-53 meters per decade is attributable to human-induced warming of the lower atmosphere.
This trend has continued even as the influence from stratospheric temperatures has waned, demonstrating that warming in the troposphere is having an increasingly large impact.