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Turbopause



 
 
The turbopause marks the altitude in the Earth's atmosphere
Earth's atmosphere

The Earth's atmosphere is a layer of gases surrounding the planet Earth that is retained by the Earth's gravity. Dry air contains roughly 78.08% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.038% Carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, and trace amounts of other gases....
 below which turbulent mixing
Turbulence

In fluid dynamics, turbulence or turbulent flow is a fluid regime characterized by chaotic, stochastic property changes. This includes low momentum diffusion, high momentum convection, and rapid variation of pressure and velocity in space and time....
 dominates. The region below the turbopause is known as the homosphere, where the chemical constituents are well mixed and display identical height distributions; in other words, the chemical composition of the atmosphere remains constant in this region for chemical species which have long mean residence times. Highly reactive chemicals tend to exhibit great concentration variability throughout the atmosphere, whereas unreactive species will exhibit more homogeneous concentrations.






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The turbopause marks the altitude in the Earth's atmosphere
Earth's atmosphere

The Earth's atmosphere is a layer of gases surrounding the planet Earth that is retained by the Earth's gravity. Dry air contains roughly 78.08% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.038% Carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, and trace amounts of other gases....
 below which turbulent mixing
Turbulence

In fluid dynamics, turbulence or turbulent flow is a fluid regime characterized by chaotic, stochastic property changes. This includes low momentum diffusion, high momentum convection, and rapid variation of pressure and velocity in space and time....
 dominates. The region below the turbopause is known as the homosphere, where the chemical constituents are well mixed and display identical height distributions; in other words, the chemical composition of the atmosphere remains constant in this region for chemical species which have long mean residence times. Highly reactive chemicals tend to exhibit great concentration variability throughout the atmosphere, whereas unreactive species will exhibit more homogeneous concentrations. The region above the turbopause is the heterosphere, where molecular diffusion
Diffusion

Molecular diffusion, often called simply diffusion, is a net transport of molecules from a region of higher concentration to one of lower concentration by random molecular motion....
 dominates and the chemical composition of the atmosphere varies according to chemical species.

The turbopause lies near the mesopause
Mesopause

The mesopause is the temperature minimum at the boundary between the mesosphere and the thermosphere atmospheric regions. Due to the lack of solar heating and very strong cooling by radiative emission from CO2, the mesopause is the coldest place on Earth with temperatures as low as -100?C [1]....
, at the intersection of the mesosphere
Mesosphere

The mesosphere is the layer of the Earth's atmosphere that is directly above the stratosphere and directly below the thermosphere. The mesosphere is located from about 50 km to 80-90 km altitude above the Earth's surface....
 and the thermosphere
Thermosphere

The thermosphere is the layer of the earth's atmosphere directly above the mesosphere and directly below the exosphere. Within this layer, ultraviolet radiation causes ionization....
, at an altitude of roughly 100 km.