Tuesday Oct. 27, 2009
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A couple of songs ("American Tune" and "The Boxer") from the Simon and Garfunkel concert in Central Park.

The 1S1P Assignment #1 reports have been graded and were returned in class. 

The 1S1P Bonus Assignment on surface weather map analysis was collected today.  The report on Causes of the Seasons is due on Thursday.

The Optional Assignment on humidity is due on Thursday Oct. 29.

As optional assignments are turned in, you will be able to find answers by following the appropriate links listed on the class homepage.

A preliminary version of the Quiz #3 Study Guide is now online.

Is winter weather coming to Tucson?  Are my tomatoes at risk of freezing?  It looks like the answer to both questions is yes.

Here's a quick "loose end" to finish up.

The combination of cold temperatures and wind make it feel colder than it really is.  The wind chill temperature is a measure of how much colder it would feel (28 F if I remember correctly for the combination above)

Evaporation on a warm dry day will make you feel cooler than you would on a warm humid day.  Sling psychrometers make use of this to measure relative humidity and dew point.


Your body tries to stay cool by perspiring.  You would still feel hot on a hot dry day.  The heat index measures how much hotter you'd feel on a hot humid day.  The combination of heat and high humidity is a serious weather hazard because it can cause heatstroke (hyperthermia).
We spent a little time trying to understand why there is an upper limit to the amount of water vapor that can be found in air and why this depends on the air's temperature.  When air is filled to capacity with water vapor it is saturated and the relative humidity is 100%.

We first must understand that the rate at which water evaporates depends on temperature (see p. 84 in the photocopied ClassNotes).  Hot water evaporates more rapidly than cold water.  Wet laundry hung outside on a hot day will dry much more quickly than they would on a cold day.

Before talking about water, have a look at the grade distribution below.  The average appears to be about 77%.  Students with grades equal to or greater than 90.0% are exempt from the final. 

If I added 5 pts to everyones grade, Would the curve shift to the RIGHT  or the  LEFT?  Would the average grade  INCREASE,  DECREASE  or remain the  SAME?  Would the number of people that don't have to take the final  INCREASE,  DECREASE  or remain the  SAME?

Most everyone understood the curve would shift to the right as shown below.



The average grade would INCREASE and the number of people getting out of the final exam would INCREASE.

The next question was very similar.  Instead of grades, the figure below shows the distribution of the kinetic energies of water molecules in a glass of water.  There's an average and some of the water molecules (the ones at the far right end of the curve) have enough kinetic energy to be able to evaporate (similar to students that are exempt from the final exam).


If the water were heated, would the curve shift to the  RIGHT  or the  LEFT.  Would the average kinetic energy of the water molecules  INCREASE, DECREASE  or  remain the  SAME?.  Would the number of water molecules, with enough kinetic energy to be able to evaporate  INCREASE,  DECREASE,  or remain the  SAME?  The shifted curve is shown below  




The value of the average kinetic energy would increase and more molecules would lie to the right of the threshold and be able to evaporate.  Thus we conclude that hot water evaporates more rapidly than cold water.  This is shown pictorially below (the number of arrows is a measure of the rate of evaporation).




And now a completely different type of question.  The situation is shown below.


It was basically a question about how many people would have to be inside the Walmart in order for the rates at which people enter (10 people per minute) and at which people leave (10% of the people inside leave every minute) to be equal.  Once this balance is reached the number of people inside the store will remain constant.

A student answered the question correctly.  Details are shown below

rate entering = rate leaving

10 people/minute = 10% x (no. of people inside)

solve for (no. of people inside) by dividing both sides of the equation by 10% written in decimal form (0.1)
I.e.   10 / 0.1 = 100 people inside.

The Walmart problem is very similar to saturation of air with water vapor which is shown on p. 85 in the photocopied ClassNotes.



The evaporating water in Picture 1 is analogous to people entering a Walmart store.  The amount of water vapor in the air in the covered glass will begin to increase.  Some fraction of the water vapor molecules will condense (even though they might have just evaporated).  The water vapor concentration will build until the rate of condensation balances evaporation.  The air is saturated at that point.  The water vapor concentration won't increase further.  Saturated air has a relative humidity (RH) of 100%. 

Cups filled with cold and warm water are shown at the bottom of the figure.  Because of different rates of evaporation (slow in cold, rapid in warm water) the water vapor concentrations at saturation are different.  Cold saturated air won't contain as much water vapor as warm saturated air.




A variety of things can happen when you cool air to the dew point and the relative humidity increases to 100%.  Point 1 shows that when moist air next to the ground is cooled to and below the dew point, water vapor condenses onto (or is deposited onto) the ground or objects on the ground.  This is dew, frozen dew, and frost.  We covered this last Thursday.

Air above the ground can also be cooled to the dew point.  When that happens (Point 2 above) it is much easier for water vapor to condense onto something rather than just forming a small droplet of pure water.    In air above the ground water vapor condenses onto small particles in the air called condensation nuclei.  The small water droplets that form are themselves usually too small to be seen with the naked eye.  We can tell they are present (Point 3) because they either scatter (haze or fog) or reflect (clouds) sunlight. 

We'll learn a little bit about the formation of fog and haze today (Point 4) and will do a cloud-in-a-bottle demonstration (Point 5) to see the role that cloud condensation nuclei can play in cloud formation.

As mentioned earlier, when the relative humidity in air above the ground (and away from objects on the ground) reaches 100%, water vapor will condense onto small particles called condensation nuclei.  It would be much harder for the water vapor to just condense and form small droplets of pure water (you can learn why that is so by reading the top of p. 92 in the photocopied class notes).
Water vapor will condense onto certain kinds of condensation nuclei even when the relative humidity is below 100% (again you will find some explanation of this on the bottom of p. 92).  These are called hygroscopic nuclei.

In humid parts of the US, water will condense onto the grains of salt in a salt shaker causing them to stick together.  Grains of rice apparently absorb moisture which keeps this from happening and allows the salt to flow freely out of the shaker when needed.


This figure (bottom of p. 91)  shows how cloud condensation nuclei and increasing relative humidity can affect the appearance of the sky and the visibility.

The air in the left most figure is relatively dry.  Even though the condensation nuclei particles are too small to be seen with the human eye you can tell they are there because they scatter sunlight.  When you look at the sky you see the deep blue color caused by scattering of sunlight by air molecules mixed together with some white sunlight scattered by the condensation nuclei.  This changes the color of the sky from a deep blue to a bluish white color.  The more particles there are the whiter the sky becomes.  This is called "dry haze."

The middle picture shows what happens when you drive from the dry southwestern part of the US into the humid southeastern US.  One of the first things you would notice is the hazier appearance of the air and a decrease in visibility.  Because the relative humidity is high, water vapor begins to condense onto some of the condensation nuclei particles (the hygroscopic nuclei) in the air and forms small water droplets.  The water droplets scatter more sunlight than just small particles alone.  The increase in the amount of scattered light is what gives the air its hazier appearance. This is called "wet haze."

Finally when the relative humidity increases to 100% fog forms.  Fog can cause a severe drop in the visibility.  The thickest fog forms in dirty air that contains lots of condensation nuclei.  We will see this effect in the cloud-in-a-bottle demonstration coming up at the end of class.

A short video showed how water vapor would, over time, preferentially condense onto small grains of salt rather than small spheres of glass.  The figure below wasn't shown in class.


The start of the video at left showed the small grains of salt were placed on a platform in a petri dish containing water.  Some small spheres of glass were placed in the same dish.  After about 1 hour small drops of water had formed around each of the grains of salt but not the glass grains (shown above at right). 


With cold and possibly wet weather being forecast, you might have a chance to see some fog in Tucson.  To produce fog you first need to increase the relative humidity (RH) to 100%



You can do this either by cooling the air (radiation fog) or adding moisture to and saturating the air (evaporation or steam fog).  Both will increase the ratio in the RH formula above.

Probably the most common type of fog in Tucson is radiation fog.  The ground cools during the night by emitting IR radiation (left figure below).  The ground cools most rapidly and gets coldest when the skies are free of clouds and the air is dry (except for a thin layer next to the ground.
). 
Air in contact with the ground cools and radiation fog can form (right figure above).  Because the fog cloud is colder than the air right above, this is a stable situation.  The fog clouds "hugs" the ground.

Radiation fog is sometimes called valley fog (the figure below wasn't shown in class)


The cold dense foggy air will move downhill and fill low lying areas.   It is often difficult for the sun to warm the air and dissipate thick clouds of valley fog.

Steam fog (aka evaporation fog or mixing fog) is commonly observed on cold mornings over the relatively warm water in a swimming pool.



Water evaporating from the pool saturates the cold air above.  Because the fog cloud is warmer than the cold surrounding air, the fog clouds float upward.

When you "see your breath" on a cold day (the figure below wasn't shown in class)


you're seeing mixing fog.  Warm moist air from your mouth mixes with the colder air outside.  The mixture is saturated and a fog cloud forms.

Next it was time for a demonstration that puts together many of the concepts we have been covering.  Cooling air and changing relative humidity, condensation nuclei, and scattering of light are all involved in this demonstration.



We used a strong, thick-walled, 4 liter flask (vaccum flasks like this are designed to not implode when all of the air is pumped out of them, they aren't designed to not explode when pressurized).  There was a little water in the bottom of the flask to moisten the air in the flask.  Next we pressurized the air in the flask with a bicycle pump.  At some point the pressure blows the cork out of the top of the flask.  The air in the flask expands outward and cools.  This sudden cooling increases the relative humidity of the moist air in the flask to 100% ( probably more than 100% momentarily ) and water vapor condenses onto cloud condensation nuclei in the air.  A faint cloud became visible at this point.  The cloud droplets are too small to be seen with the human eye.  You can see the cloud because the water droplets scatter light.

The demonstration was repeated an additional time with one small change.  A burning match was dropped into the bottle.  The smoke from the match added lots of very small particles, condensation nuclei, to the air in the flask.  The cloud that formed this time was quite a bit "thicker" and much easier to see.





Clouds are one of the best ways of cleaning the atmosphere (cloud droplets form on particles, the droplets "clump" together to form a raindrop, and the raindrop carries the particles to the ground).  A raindrop can contain 1 million cloud droplets so a single raindrop can remove a lot of particles from the air.  You may have noticed how clear the air seems the day after a rainstorm; distant mountains are crystal clear and the sky has a deep blue color.  Gaseous pollutants can dissolve in the water droplets and be carried to the ground by rainfall also.


A cloud that forms in dirty air is composed of a large number of small droplets (right figure above).  This cloud is more reflective than a cloud that forms in clean air, that is composed of a smaller number of larger droplets (left figure).   Just like in the cloud-in-a-bottle demonstration, the cloud that was created when the air was full of smoke particles was much more visible than the cloud made with cleaner air.

This is has implications for climate change.  Combustion of fossil fuels adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.  There is concern that increasing carbon dioxide concentrations will enhance the greenhouse effect and cause global warming.  Combustion also adds condensation nuclei to the atmosphere (just like the burning match added smoke to the air in the flask).  More condensation nuclei might make it easier for clouds to form, might make the clouds more reflective, and might cause cooling.  There is still quite a bit of uncertainty about how clouds might change and how this might affect climate (remember too that clouds are good absorbers of IR radiation).