Fri., Feb. 12 notes

Friday Feb. 12, 2010
click here to download today's notes in a more printer friendly format.

Sorry about taking so long to get the notes online, it was just too nice of a weekend and my garden needed my attention.

We only had time for a couple of Pink Martini songs before class today ("Let's Never Stop Falling in Love" and "Hey Eugene")

I might not have mentioned that the Quiz #1 Study Guide is now online. I don't expect there will be many changes made to the study guide between now and early next week.

Class started with a quick review of some material we covered at the end of the period on Wednesday.
Processes that cause rising air motions
(1) Convergence (winds spiraling into surface centers of low pressure)
(2) Fronts (both warm and cold fronts)
(3) Free convection (see below)

Warm air rises basically.
Rising air motions are important because rising air expands and cools. Cooling moist air can cause clouds to form.

This leads to what might seem to be contradictory statements

warm air rises
rising air cools

It is important to remember that two separate things are going on here, the word order is important. Air that is warmer than the air surrounding it will rise. Once the air starts to rise it will expand and start to cool. This might best be illustrated in a picture.

(a) the air parcel is warmer than the surrounding air and will rise
(b) the rising parcel has expanded and cooled

Will the air keep on rising and cooling? That depends on how quickly the rising air cools and what the temperature of the air around it is. Again two pictures can be used to illustrate two possible outcomes.

Left Figure
(c) the atmosphere has cooled to 61 F
(d) the rising parcel is colder than the surrounding air and will sink

Right Figure
(c) the atmosphere has cooled more, to 59F
(d) the rising parcel is warmer than the surrouding air and will continue to rise

The 4th process that causes rising air motions was stuck onto the end of Wednesday's notes
Topographic or Orographic lifting is the 4th way of causing air to rise.

When moving air encounters a mountain it must pass over it. You often find clouds and rain on the windward side of the mountain where the air rises. Drier conditions, a rain shadow, is found on the leeward side where the air is sinking (assuming that the winds mostly blow in the same direction over the mountain).

We watched a couple of video segments during class today. The first may have been inserted hear. After having successfully traveled into the stratosphere by balloon, Auguste Piccard became interested in descending to the bottom of the ocean in a bathyscaph. The video showed one of the trial runs of the bathyscaph. Auguste and his son Jacques descended to 10,000 feet where the pressure on the walls of the bathyscape were 5000 psi.

We spent most of the class today learning about some of the weather conditions that precede and follow passage of warm and cold fronts.

A crossectional view of a cold front is shown below:

Here are some of the specific weather changes

Weather variable	Behind	Passing	Ahead
Temperature	cool, cold, colder*		warm
Dew Point	usually much drier*		may be moist (though that is often not the case here in the desert southwest)
Winds	northwest	gusty winds (dusty)	from the southwest
Clouds, Weather	clearing	rain clouds, thunderstorms in narrow band along the front (if the warm air mass is moist)	might see some high clouds
Pressure	rising	reaches a minimum	falling

* the coldest air might follow passage of a cold front by a day or two. Nighttime temperatures often plummet in the cold dry air behind a cold front.

A temperature drop is probably the most obvious change associated with a cold front. Here is southern Arizona, gusty winds and a wind shift are also often noticeable when a cold front passes.

The pressure changes that precede and follow a cold front are not something we would observe or feel but are very useful when trying to locate a front on a weather map.

In the next figure we started with some weather data plotted on a surface map using the station model notation.

Before trying to locate a cold front, we needed to draw in a few isobars and map out the pressure pattern. In some respects fronts are like spokes on a wheel - they rotate counterclockwise around centers of low pressure. It makes sense to first determine the location of the low pressure center.

Isobars are drawn at 4 mb increments above and below a starting value of 1000 mb. Some of the allowed values are shown on the right side of the figure. The highest pressure on the map is 1003.0 mb, the lowest is 994.9 mb. Thus we have drawn in 996 mb and 1000 mb isobars.

The next step was to try to locate the warm air mass in the picture. Temperatures are in the 60s in the lower right portion of the map; this area has been circled in red.

The cold front on the map seems to be properly postioned. The air ahead of the front is warm, moist, has winds blowing from the S or SW, and the pressure is falling. These are all things you would expect to find ahead of a cold front.

Clouds and a rain shower were located right near the front which is typically where they are found.

The air behind the front is colder, drier, winds are blowing from the NW, and the pressure is falling. Note how the cold front is positioned at the leading edge of the cold air mass, not necessarily in front of the coldest air in the cold air mass.

Next we went through the same procedure with warm fronts.
Here's the crossectional view

Here ae the weather changes in advance of and following the frontal passage.

Weather Variable	Behind (after)	Passing	Ahead (before)
Temperature	warmer		cool
Dew point	may be moister		drier
Winds	from S or SW		from E or SE
Clouds, Weather	clearing		wide variety of clouds well ahead of the front, may be a wide variety of types of precipitation also.
Pressure	rising	minimum	falling

And here is the surface map analysis:

Note the extensive cloud coverage and precipitation found ahead of the warm front. There is a pretty good temperature and dew point difference on opposite sides of the warm front and a clear shift in wind directions. Pressure is falling ahead of the warm front and rising behind.

There was also pretty clear evidence of a cold front on this map.

I've gone back to the surface map example on page 39 in the ClassNotes and have sketched in a warm front and a cold front. We were trying to figure out what was causing the clouds in the NE portion of the map and what was causing the rain shower along the Gulf Coast. This wasn't shown in class on Friday.

The warm front is probably what is producing most of the widespread cloudiness and precipitation in the NE portion of the map (rising air motions caused by surface winds converging into the low pressure center are also contributing). The cold front is producing the showers along the Gulf Coast.

Class ended with about a 10 minute video showing the first successful non-stop trip around the globe by balloon. Bertrand Piccard and Brain Jones were the winning team and completed the trip in the Breitling Orbiter 3 on Mar. 20, 1999. It looked like they might actually lose the race to another balloon, the Cable and Wireless balloon piloted by Andy Elsen and Colin Prescot. That balloon had launched earlier and had built up about a 10 day lead but then crashed in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Japan after flying through some stormy weather and icing up.