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Re: Winds and temperature



I don't understand the topography described below. The sink hole is at
higher elevation than the town; the town is down the hill?

The temp. at a lower elevate (down the hill) than the sink hole is higher?


Here's my experience. while a grad student at UCSB I lived in town (SB)
and commuted to school in Goleta along the highway frontage road using a
Vespa. In several places the road dips I guess ~ 50 feet. On still,
clear nights, tho conformable elsewhere, I froze in the dips. The
difference was very remarkable.

My host in Sweden said one could tell the nationality of the home owners
in his region. The Swedes would build near the shore of the lake, while
the Fins would build higher up on the side of the hills and laugh at the
Swedes freezing, even in Summer. My guess is the Swedes are attached to
water.

bc

Mark Sylvester wrote:

I saw striking confirmation of this a few years ago when helping our
environmental systems dept out with some student projects. We put some
temperature probes attached to datalogging boxes at gound level at
different heights on the slope of a large "dolina" (the hollow typical of
karst landscape) just above our town to record the temperature at 5 minute
intervals from afternoon to mid-morning, over a clear night in early
spring. The idea was to measure the temperature inversion.

As soon as the sun left the dolina the temperature began to plummet, and by
21:00 it was approaching minus 10 celsius, way below what we were
experiencing down the hill. As it turned out, it was a clear night, but at
about 23:00 the wind suddenly started up, and blew for the rest of the
night. Coinciding with the wind starting, the temperature on all the probes
shot up by more than 10 degrees within a few data points, staying there for
the rest of the night.

Mark

At 13:56 16/02/04 -0800, John Denker wrote:


Quoting Gary Turner <turner@MORNINGSIDE.EDU>:



I hear frequently on weather reports comments along the lines of "little
wind tonight so expect temperatures to drop". I haven't managed to
convince myself of the reason for this,


Various people have mentioned some correct parts of the answer;
let me try to pull together something more complete.

First of all, let me change the question slightly: If we
have a CLEAR SKY and light winds, then we expect a big
temperature drop ... specially in the mountains, the desert,
or extra-especially the high desert.

Factors include:
-- dry air is transparent to thermal IR.
-- water vapor (clouds or humid air) is pretty much
a black body at thermal IR wavelengths.
-- terrain (including rocks, soil, plants, puddles, etc.) is
pretty much a black body.
-- the terrain cools by radiation. Stefan-Boltzmann and all that.
It's trying to come into equilibrium with the sky, which is at
three kelvin!
-- typical terrain (not including the ocean surface) has rather
little heat conductivity, so the surface of the terrain cools
quickly.
-- the lowest levels of the air cool by conduction, by contact
with the cold terrain.
-- if you stir the air (e.g. due to wind) you would have to cool
the entire air column, which has a considerable heat capacity.
OTOH if you don't stir the air, only the lowest bits of air
are subject to cooling, so they cool quicker and get colder.
Most people (not including pilots) generally only care about
the temperature of the lowest few feet of air.
-- Once a cold layer forms, it will tend to stay there since it
is an inversion. The normal profile of the air is to be
warmer below and cooler above, right at the very edge of
convective instability.

Non-factors include:
-- Sinking of cold air. There's usually not any supply of cold
air available for sinking, and if it did sink, it would warm
itself adiabatically anyway.



Mark Sylvester
UWCAd
Duino Trieste Italy