Our Solar Pond

Look Ma! No Atmosphere!  You can't have a Green House Effect without an atmosphere!  Actually you can, which is the point I have been working on, balancing the system from the inside out.

The nifty thing about the darker blue layer is the 334.5Wm-2 is the approximate radiant energy of a layer of salt water at 4 degrees centigrade.  The layers are the ocean with the dark blue the deep ocean, the light blue the mixing layer and the red the tropical ocean.  The gray blocks are ice with 307 the approximate radiant energy of salt water at -1.9C the current freezing point in the bottom and the 316Wm-2 the approximate radiant energy of fresh ice and snow.  Since the values of the energy of ice is fairly well fixed by the enthalpy of fusion, they make a good base or reference for the energy balance.

The radiant energy though is not exactly comparable to the energy content of the water and ice.  Since I want a model that is as simple as possible, I would like to have a more direct relationship between the energy content or capacity of the water/ice.  To do that I am going to use the enthalpy of fusion, 334Joules per gram  and the specific enthalpy for each degree of temperature change for each gram of water.  Since salt water freezes at a lower temperature than fresh water, there is a range of enthalpy for the cold sink of the system.

 For now I am just leaving the sketch and the concept while I double check a few things.  If you want, see how well you can balance things out using the Stefan-Boltzmann black body approximations of the slab energies.