Unusual temperature changes with Altitude

[nei]

The day/night differences seem less drastic in the European examples. In fact, for January in both European examples the night temperatures decline faster with altitude than the days. Perhaps because both of these places sit in a deep valley so the low elevation location is unusually cold for its elevation.

Precipitation increases much more with elevation for the American locations. Either there was something atypical about my European locations, or the east-west direction of European mountain ranges mean they don't catch as much precipitation.

[nei]

Found two articles on temperature changes with altitude (lapse rate). Western US:

http://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/1964/report.pdf

and for the mountains of the Northeast:

http://www.forest.sr.unh.edu/richardson/3Met.pdf

Figure is 3 is interesting; all the mountains follow the same profile. Mt. Washington isn't cold for its altitude and region, just especially high. The diurnal lapse rate cycle is shown in Figure 6.

[nei]

From the latter paper on the low treeline in the Northeast US:

Within the Appalachian Mountain chain, Cogbill and White (1991) reported that treeline correlated with the 13°C July isotherm, whereas Daubenmire (1954) found that treeline locations in western North America correlated well with the 10°C July isotherm. Even taking in to account the fact that, in the northeastern United States, July 2002 was roughly one-half a degree warmer than normal (based on the 1961–1990 station norms for the six NOAA stations used here), these data support the idea that air temperatures at treeline in this region are warmer than those in the western USA. Treeline thus occurs at a lower elevation than would be expected on the basis of air temperature alone.

So the transition to no trees happens at a higher annual temperature in the Northeast US than the West.

[nei]

Another interesting tidbit I found for those with an interest in the mountains of the Northeast US.

In the northern Appalachians, cloud ceiling is thought to control the boundary (Fig. 4) between low-elevation
deciduous and high-elevation coniferous forests frequent fog immersion is thought to also control the extent of spruce-fir forests in coastal Maine.

So, in other words the average elevation of the base of clouds on overcast days corresponds well to the transition between deciduous forest and conifer forest. In a sense, they're "cloud forests".

From:

http://www.forest.sr.unh.edu/richardson/Cloud.pdf