(pre-script- HBD to the great Antimony, and I hope to send that PC unit today, WhiskeyFightPit)
AIR
"Air can hurt you, too" - David Byrne
Some notes about the higher atmosphere, and turbulence, from Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything
After you have left the troposphere [six miles up] the temperature soon warms up... to about 40 degrees F, thanks to the absorptive effects of the ozone. It then plunges as low as -130 F in the mesosphere before skyrocketing to 2700 degrees or more in the aptly-named but very erratic thermosphere, where temperatures can vary by a thousand degrees from day to night... Temperature is really just a measure of the activity of molecules. At sea level, air molecules are so thick that one molecule can move only three millionths of an inch before banging into another. Because trillions of molecules are constantly colliding, a lot of heat gets exchanged. But at the height of the thermosphere, at fifty miles or more, the air is so thin that any two molecules will be miles apart and hardly ever come in contact, so, although each molecule is very warm, there are few interactions between them and thus little heat transference. This is good news for satellites and spaceships because if the exchange of heat was more efficient any man-made object orbiting at that level would burst into flame.
Jet streams, usually located about 30,000 to 35,000 feet up, can bowl along at up to 180 miles an hour and vastly influence weather systems over whole continents, yet their existence wasn't suspected until pilots began to fly into them during the Second World War. Even now a great deal of atmospheric phenomena is barely understood. A form of wave motion popularly known as clear-air turbulence occasionally enlivens airplane flights. About twenty such incidents a year are serious enough to need reporting. They are not auspicated with cloud structures or anything else that can be detected visually or by radar... In a typical incident, a plane en route from Singapore to Sydney was flying over central Australia in calm conditions when it suddenly fell three hundred feet- enough to fling unsecured people against the ceiling. Twelve people were injured, one seriously.
...because heat from the sun is unevenly distributed, differences in air pressure arise on the planet. Air can't abide this, so it rushes around trying to equalize things everywhere. Wind is simply the air's way of trying to keep things in balance. Air always flows from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure... and the greater the discrepancy in pressures the faster the wind blows.
wind speeds grow exponentially, so a wind blowing at two hundred miles per hour is not simply ten times stronger than a wind blowing at twenty miles an hour, but a hundred times stronger Introduce several million tons of air to this accelerator effect and the results can be exceedingly energetic. A tropical hurricane can release in twenty four hours as much energy as a rich, medium-sized nation like Britain or France uses in a year.
AIR
"Air can hurt you, too" - David Byrne
Some notes about the higher atmosphere, and turbulence, from Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything
After you have left the troposphere [six miles up] the temperature soon warms up... to about 40 degrees F, thanks to the absorptive effects of the ozone. It then plunges as low as -130 F in the mesosphere before skyrocketing to 2700 degrees or more in the aptly-named but very erratic thermosphere, where temperatures can vary by a thousand degrees from day to night... Temperature is really just a measure of the activity of molecules. At sea level, air molecules are so thick that one molecule can move only three millionths of an inch before banging into another. Because trillions of molecules are constantly colliding, a lot of heat gets exchanged. But at the height of the thermosphere, at fifty miles or more, the air is so thin that any two molecules will be miles apart and hardly ever come in contact, so, although each molecule is very warm, there are few interactions between them and thus little heat transference. This is good news for satellites and spaceships because if the exchange of heat was more efficient any man-made object orbiting at that level would burst into flame.
Jet streams, usually located about 30,000 to 35,000 feet up, can bowl along at up to 180 miles an hour and vastly influence weather systems over whole continents, yet their existence wasn't suspected until pilots began to fly into them during the Second World War. Even now a great deal of atmospheric phenomena is barely understood. A form of wave motion popularly known as clear-air turbulence occasionally enlivens airplane flights. About twenty such incidents a year are serious enough to need reporting. They are not auspicated with cloud structures or anything else that can be detected visually or by radar... In a typical incident, a plane en route from Singapore to Sydney was flying over central Australia in calm conditions when it suddenly fell three hundred feet- enough to fling unsecured people against the ceiling. Twelve people were injured, one seriously.
...because heat from the sun is unevenly distributed, differences in air pressure arise on the planet. Air can't abide this, so it rushes around trying to equalize things everywhere. Wind is simply the air's way of trying to keep things in balance. Air always flows from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure... and the greater the discrepancy in pressures the faster the wind blows.
wind speeds grow exponentially, so a wind blowing at two hundred miles per hour is not simply ten times stronger than a wind blowing at twenty miles an hour, but a hundred times stronger Introduce several million tons of air to this accelerator effect and the results can be exceedingly energetic. A tropical hurricane can release in twenty four hours as much energy as a rich, medium-sized nation like Britain or France uses in a year.
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