Understandings:
• Conduction, convection, and thermal radiation
• Black-body radiation
• Albedo and emissivity
• The solar constant
• The greenhouse effect
• Energy balance in the Earth surface/atmosphere
system
Applications and skills:
• Sketching and interpreting graphs showing the variation of intensity with wavelength for bodies.
emitting thermal radiation at different temperatures
• Solving problems involving the Stefan–Boltzmann law and Wien’s displacement law.
• Describing the effects of the Earth’s atmosphere on the mean surface temperature.