Paul Klee & the Earth’s radiation budget

Greeting 1922 Paul Klee
Greeting – Paul Klee (1922)

The wonderful Paul Klee exhibition currently at the Tate Modern in London contains this rather curious work which suggests that the great artist may have been inspired by the fluxes of infrared and solar radiation in the atmosphere! The colours of the arrows are right – red for the upwelling longwave, blue for the incoming shortwave – and the gradation from top to bottom suggests the decrease of temperature with altitude as one moves from the surface to the top-of-the-atmosphere. Just whimsical speculation on my part of course…but wouldn’t it be amazing if it were true?

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