Alpine climate

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Alpine climate

:For the climate of the mountains named the Alps, see Climate of the Alps
Climate of the Alps

The climate of the Alps is the climate, or average weather conditions over a long time, of the exact middle Alps region of Europe. As air rises from sea level to the upper regions of the Earth's atmosphere the temperature adiabatic lapse rate....
.

Alpine climate is the average weather (climate

Climate

Climate encompasses the temperatures, humidity, atmospheric pressure, winds, rainfall, atmospheric particle count and numerous other Meteorology elements in a given region over long periods of time, as opposed to the term weather, which refers to current activity of these same elements....
) for a region above the tree line. The climate becomes colder at high elevation

Elevation

The elevation of a geographic location is its height above a fixed reference point, often the above mean sea level. Elevation, or geometric height, is mainly used when referring to points on the Earth's surface, while altitude or geopotential height is used for points above the surface, such as an aircraft in flight or a s...
s—this characteristic is described by the lapse rate of air: air tends to get colder as it rises, since it expands.

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Encyclopedia

Climate

Elevation

Latitude

Latitude, usually denoted symbolically by the Greek letter phi gives the location of a place on Earth north or south of the equator. Lines of Latitude are the horizontal lines shown running east-to-west on maps ....
) towards the pole. This relationship is only approximate, however, since local factors such as proximity to ocean

Ocean

An ocean is a major body of Seawater, and a principal component of the hydrosphere. Approximately 71% of the Earth's surface is covered by ocean, a World Ocean that is customarily divided into several principal oceans and smaller seas....
s can drastically modify the climate.

Quantifying the climate

There have been several attempts at quantifying what constitutes an alpine climate.

Climatologist Wladimir Köppen

Wladimir Köppen

Wladimir Peter K?ppen was a Russian born geography, meteorology, climatology and botany of Germans descent. After studies in St. Petersburg, he spent the bulk of his life and professional career in Germany and Austria....
demonstrated a relationship between the Arctic and Antarctic tree lines and the 10°C summer isotherm; i.e., places where the average temperature in the warmest calendar month of the year is below 10°C cannot support forests. See Köppen climate classification

Köppen climate classification

The K?ppen climate classification is one of the most widely used climate classifications. It was developed by Wladimir K?ppen, a Russian climatologist, around 1900 ....
for more information.

Otto Nordenskiöld

Otto Nordenskiöld

File:Otto Nordenskj?ld.jpgDr Nils Otto Gustaf Nordenskj?ld was a Sweden geologist, geographer, and polar explorer.Nordenskj?ld was born in Hesselby in Sm?land in eastern Sweden, in a Finland Swedish family that included his maternal uncle Adolf Erik Nordenski?ld, a noted polar explorer....
theorized that winter conditions also play a role: His formula is W = 9 - 0.1 C, where W is the average temperature in the warmest month and C the average of the coldest month, both in degrees Celsius (this would mean, for example, that if a particular location had an average temperature of -20 °C in its coldest month, the warmest month would need to average 11 °C or higher for trees to be able to survive there). Nordenskiöld's line tends to run to the north of Köppen's near the west coasts of the Northern Hemisphere continents, south of it in the interior sections, and at about the same latitude along the east coasts of both Asia and North America. In the Southern Hemisphere, all of Tierra del Fuego

Tierra del Fuego

Tierra del Fuego is an archipelago separated from the southernmost tip of the South American mainland by the Strait of Magellan. The southern point of the archipelago forms Cape Horn....
lies outside the polar region in Nordenskiöld's system, but part of the island (including Ushuaia, Argentina) is reckoned as being within the Antarctic under Köppen's.

In 1947, Holdridge improved on these schemes, by defining biotemperature: the mean annual temperature, where all temperatures below 0 °C are treated as 0 °C (because it makes no difference to plant life, being dormant). If the mean biotemperature is between 1.5 °C and 3 °C, Holdridge quantifies the climate as alpine (or subpolar, if the low temperature is caused by latitude).