Oceans absorb solar radiation far better than continents
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Not to be a wise ass, but how do you explain the East coast late afternoon on-shore breezes? I use East coast because that is what I’m familiar with
The way I always thought these were generated was that the Sun heats up the land and the water. As the sun moves Westward, the ocean starts to cool. The land however retains the sun’s heat. Cool air over the ocean, being more dense than warm air, begins to flow toward the warm air over land.
This is an everyday occurrence all summer and well into the fall (Harvest Moon) While fishing off Montauk Pt. as soon as the fresh on-shore breeze would start raising whitecaps, we knew it was about three o’clock and time to head in. We even used to call it the “three o’clock” wind.
The reason is because land materials e.g. rock, dirt, sand etc have a smaller specific heat capacity than water. So during the day the land mass gets hotter than the surrounding sea/ocean and at night cools quicker than the surrounding water, thus the shifting winds at the interface between the two. The ability to absorb/radiate heat is dictated by surface emissivity and is a distinctly different property than specific heat capacity (how much heat it can absorb on a normalized mass basis with a unit rise in temperature). In lay terms, water resists changes in temperature more than land materials. Also this article is pretty myopic since any disturbance from river meanderings to asteroid impact to an already stabilized ecosystem will create niches that are aggressively filled by the biological fringes which are high in natural mutations that are always present, just not necessarily advantageous in the stabilized ecosystem.
This is how I understand coastal air flow without outside influences. Sunshine warms land faster than water. Warm air rises. The rising air creates a vacuum at lower altitudes over land which gets filled in by onshore winds. After sunshine leaves rising coastal columns fall and create offshore winds. I’ve observed these trends in coastal Texas for most of my life.