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The concept of residence time of energy in a planetary atmosphere τ푅, recently introduced and computed for the Earth's atmosphere (Osácar et al., 2020), is here extended to the atmospheres of Venus, Mars and Titan. After a global thermal perturbation, τ푅is the time scale the atmosphere needs to return to equilibrium. The residence times of energy in the atmospheres of Venus, Earth, Mars and Titan have been computed. In the cases of Venus, Mars and Titan, these are mere lower bounds due to a lack of some energy data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In atmospheric chemistry, a parameter called residence time is defined for each gas asT = M/F, whereM represents the mass of the gas in the atmosphere andF is the total average influx or outflux, which in time averages are equal. In this letter we extend this concept from matter to energy which is also a conservative quantity and estimate the average residence time of energy in the atmosphere which amounts to about 56 days. A similar estimation for the residence time of energy in the Sun is of the order of 107 yr, which agrees with the Kelvin-Helmholtz time scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]