Knowing all the physical inputs : Solar radiation from sun at different times of the year, light transmitted through the atmosphere, Surface emissivity, air conductivity / specific heat etc etc, is it possible to calculate (from physics / first principles) the max possible temperature at Death Valley ?
I think the issue is that these physical inputs are not immutable over the long run or even the short run. For example, the composition of the atmosphere has changed due to global climate change.
Also, I am not a climate scientist, but I don’t know if you can take all of the necessary factors and then model it analytically and spit out a single number. I think these things are determined empirically. If you want to know the maximum possible temperature I think that most we can see is that it’s 134°F at the moment.
I’ll repost here what I posted in the other thread for reference:
The surface temperature of the MOON varies from 284 degrees Fahrenheit(140 degrees Celsius) to --275.8 degrees Fahrenheit (-171 degrees Celsius).
The Moon is at the same distance from the Sun as the Earth so that’s what temperatures on Earth would probably be if it did NOT have an atmosphere.
Obviously the atmosphere protects the Earth in some way from reaching such extremes. I am not sure of the exact reason why. Perhaps someone else could explain why atmosphere surface temperatures could not reach such extreme highs.
Another biggie is that the day-night cycle on the Moon lasts for a month, not just 24 hours like on Earth. The longer it stays dark, the colder you can get your low temperature to, and the longer it stays light, the hotter you can get your high temperature to.
Weighing in from the point of view of a physicist who concentrates on heat transfer and has spent the last couple of years particularly on computational fluid dynamics and radiation simulation, I think the project of figuring out what is the theoretical max would take quite a lot of effort, and the people doing it would practically have the goal of getting numbers pretty close to the records that have been set there. I think they’d take it as part of the framework of the analysis that the answer should be as close to 134 F as they can get it, depending on how long you want them to work on it.
Rather than starting from first principles, perhaps an approach more in the form of perturbations would be better. That is, you study the conditions around the times of the records that have been set, and look for which conditions could have been a little more conducive to high temperatures, and ask if there are times when those conditions ever reach those values. For example, suppose you figure out that you want more sunspots (or fewer ones, I dunno) to get the greatest extremes, then you might ask what the temperature would have been if everything else was like it was when we hit 134, but the sunspot number was the most favorable it had ever been. You might come up with a statement like “every 250 years you should see 135 F”.