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Rossow, W.B., J.J. Bates, J. Romanski, Y-C. Zhang, K. Knapp, and E. Duenas, 2006: Analyzing the variations of the global energy and water cycle. GEWEX News, 16, no. 2, 4-6.
The core of the Earth's climate system is an energy cycle that converts absorbed solar radiation into heat and associated terrestrial radiation into the circulations of the atmosphere and ocean. A key exchange of energy within this system, which also couples the circulations of the atmosphere and ocean, is between the surface and the atmosphere, primarily through evaporation cooling of the surface and precipitation heating of the atmosphere, thereby intimately linking the energy and water cycle. Because of the Earth's spherical shape, its rapid rotation, and its elliptical orbit about the sun, the solar heating is neither uniform nor constant. Because of the turbulent nature of the atmospheric and oceanic motions that transport heat and water, the response of the system is not steady. Hence, the "climate," which is usually portrayed as a static state of a single system, is actually an amalgam of variations of energy and water exchanges among several climate system components that respond on a broad range of space-time scales and are coupled by the exchanges of energy and water. Although some statistics of these variations may be static, the energy-water cycle is fundamentally dynamic.
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