Weather!

[owlice]

Snow here in DC, too, but not enough, not enough!

[Ann]

Some interesting images of "Slurpee Waves" in Nantucket
http://client.jdnphotography.com/slurpeewaves/

Click to view full size image

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Wow. That's rather amazing.

Winter here has been mild, and spring has arrived earlier than ever recorded before in the northern parts of Sweden. (Spring is defined by the Swedish meteorological institute as having arrived when the average 24-hour day and night temperature has been above freezing for seven days in a row.)

Last week has been quite sunny. But today, wouldn't you know it, we had thick clouds. But things could have been worse, because the Sun peeked through the clouds, heavily obscured but still visible, during at least parts of the eclipse.

Tomorrow we will have rain, stiff winds and some snow, and then plunging temperatures.

Ann

[rstevenson]

Really bad March here, and February was no peach either.

Average snowfall for the Halifax region for February: 41cm; this February: 131cm.
Average snowfall March 1 to 20: 5cm; this year: 93cm.

That last stat confirms what many were thinking, that these last two storms together (over a four-day period this week) put down more snow than White Juan, the February 2004 massive snow storm that followed September 2003's Hurricane Juan.

I just got my car shovelled out from the Wednesday storm. Just in time -- cabin fever was setting in, and I'd run out of cookies and beer.

Rob

[orin stepanek]

It's been a dry winter here; but the temperature has been like a yo-yo! It has got very very cold at times and other days have been unseasonably warm. It snowed today and it is supposed to get in the 70s this weekend! Glad we didn't get the twisters like they did in Oklahoma!

[FloridaMike]

Warm winter here in Mid Florida. We have sewn bed sheets together to create a cover for the Robellini palm in our yard. A typical winter requires covering it half a dozen times, covered it twice this year just out of precaution and was not needed. I doubt a single mosquito died of the chill.

[Beyond]

Apparently, the Northeast (USA) was the only colder than normal place on the earth for the first 3-months of the year, although January was rather nice... until the end, when the blizzard hit.

http://www.wfsb.com/story/28830787/the- ... start=true

[Beyond]

It was 35 degrees F just after 1:00 am this morning. It's now 1:30 pm and it's been 80 degrees F for over an hour. That's New England.

[Chris Peterson]

Just crazy. This is the wettest spring I remember, even from back before the extended drought conditions began over 10 years back. Since the beginning of the month we've had two huge snowstorms, one dropping 20 inches and the next 12 inches. Now we're having another, which has so far dropped several inches. Hard to gauge these storms because it's warm, and the snow settles into itself and becomes very heavy. We've had about 12" of total precipitation so far, which is more than we get in some years. The heavy snow has taken down some trees and branches, but the springs and creeks are flowing, and every pond is overflowing (including some that haven't had any water in them at all in the last few years). In between the snowstorms we've had rain... nearly every day. The pasture grass is coming through it, and we've got more wildflowers coming up than I've ever seen before mid-June. Everything is just sucking up all this wonderful water. Not sure when it's going to end- the forecast just shows more rain for the next week or more. And only a few weeks until the monsoon should come, with its afternoon thunderstorms. In most years, that's where most our water comes from.

This is out my office door right now.

[BMAONE23]

Chris,
Would you be so kind as to construct a pipeline from your place to the California watershed regions
I would appreciate it

Thanks

[geckzilla]

Haha, forget it, B. They're putting it all in their new legal rain barrels.

[Chris Peterson]

Haha, forget it, B. They're putting it all in their new legal rain barrels.

They were already there. That was one of the most widely ignored laws ever.

[Ron-Astro Pharmacist]

Physics and engineering is not my cup-o-tea either but I could never figure out why we can't construct outside pressure-resistant pipelines that would draw air from high pressure areas to low pressure areas using the difference to drive generators? The idea has been put out there and sounds like it's patented.

http://pesn.com/2005/10/27/9600188_Atmo ... Megawatts/

The logistics must have made the concept not feasible. I do wonder if it would work. Is anyone up for using the vacuum of space to suck all the excess CO2 out of the atmosphere with a sky elevator technique? Not even "wanna be Mark Watney" worthy. Speaking of which, the Idaho Potato Commission is not going to like the reference to Idaho in "The Martian"!

[Nitpicker]

Physics and engineering is not my cup-o-tea either but I could never figure out why we can't construct outside pressure-resistant pipelines that would draw air from high pressure areas to low pressure areas using the difference to drive generators? The idea has been put out there and sounds like it's patented.

http://pesn.com/2005/10/27/9600188_Atmo ... Megawatts/

The logistics must have made the concept not feasible. I do wonder if it would work. Is anyone up for using the vacuum of space to suck all the excess CO2 out of the atmosphere with a sky elevator technique? Not even "wanna be Mark Watney" worthy. Speaking of which, the Idaho Potato Commission is not going to like the reference to Idaho in "The Martian"!

Because the pressure difference is far too small to overcome the friction in the pipes.

[neufer]

Physics and engineering is not my cup-o-tea either but I could never figure out why we can't construct outside pressure-resistant pipelines that would draw air from high pressure areas to low pressure areas using the difference to drive generators? The idea has been put out there and sounds like it's patented.

http://pesn.com/2005/10/27/9600188_Atmo ... Megawatts/

The logistics must have made the concept not feasible. I do wonder if it would work. Is anyone up for using the vacuum of space to suck all the excess CO2 out of the atmosphere with a sky elevator technique? Not even "wanna be Mark Watney" worthy. Speaking of which, the Idaho Potato Commission is not going to like the reference to Idaho in "The Martian"!

Because the pressure difference is far too small to overcome the friction in the pipes.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=crock

1) Tapping vertical air pressure differences is as useless as tapping vertical water pressure differences.

2) Horizontal pressure differences can only generate (subsonic) piped winds comparable
in speed to the (subsonic) surface winds already generated naturally by such weather systems.
And weather system surface winds can be easily tapped using current wind farm turbines.

( Supersonic wind tunnels require drops in pressure on the order of a factor of 10.)

3) A pipe containing a piston 'might' conceivably work ... however:

• Say you had a humongous pipe ~1,000km long / 100m in diameter connecting the eye of Super Typhoon Tip with its outer edge. Energy could then be obtained from a 100m diameter pipe piston moving at a steady clip of 20km/hr towards the eye.
  
  At most such a monster piston would generate ~550 MW of power:
  equivalent to the 25 km² Topaz Solar Farm (or perhaps the Macarthur Wind Farm on a windy day).

[Ron-Astro Pharmacist]

It would be cool if it could work for a useful, clean purpose. After thinking about it, like our intrepid Martian leftover, maybe it could be used to scrub the CO2 in excess in the atmosphere too.

[Chris Peterson]

It would be cool if it could work for a useful, clean purpose. After thinking about it, like our intrepid Martian leftover, maybe it could be used to scrub the CO2 in excess in the atmosphere too. :)

How? Material moves in a horizontal pressure gradient whether or not you put a pipe between two locations. All the pipe does is create a condition where you can get more velocity, and therefore more efficiency if you're taking kinetic energy from the system. Material never moves across a vertical (gravity created) gradient, whether you have a pipe or not.

Scrubbing CO₂ is a chemical process, not a mechanical one.

[Ron-Astro Pharmacist]

It would be cool if it could work for a useful, clean purpose. After thinking about it, like our intrepid Martian leftover, maybe it could be used to scrub the CO2 in excess in the atmosphere too.

How? Material moves in a horizontal pressure gradient whether or not you put a pipe between two locations. All the pipe does is create a condition where you can get more velocity, and therefore more efficiency if you're taking kinetic energy from the system. Material never moves across a vertical (gravity created) gradient, whether you have a pipe or not.

Scrubbing CO₂ is a chemical process, not a mechanical one.

Just being tongue-in-cheek but I was referring to the horizontal, ground process of moving air from areas of high to low pressure. The sky elevator process from the post before was also, short of, tongue-in-cheek between extreme gradients of vacuum and the atmosphere really way out there as a feasible idea.

Also CO2 is heavier than O2 so the ground level process of chemical scrubbing would seem a more efficient place to carry it out – again if at all possible. Not very likely but it would be neat (61 year olds can say "neat") to have it preform two functions at once.

[Chris Peterson]

The sky elevator process from the post before was also, short of, tongue-in-cheek between extreme gradients of vacuum and the atmosphere really way out there as a feasible idea.

That one isn't even feasible. If it were, all you'd need to make a fountain in your pond or pool would be a hose between the top and bottom. After all, the bottom is at a significantly higher pressure. So why doesn't water rush through that hose?

[Ron-Astro Pharmacist]

The sky elevator process from the post before was also, short of, tongue-in-cheek between extreme gradients of vacuum and the atmosphere really way out there as a feasible idea.

That one isn't even feasible. If it were, all you'd need to make a fountain in your pond or pool would be a hose between the top and bottom. After all, the bottom is at a significantly higher pressure. So why doesn't water rush through that hose?

Gravity I suspect but wasn't there a "xkcd" what if question like this?

http://what-if.xkcd.com/53/

Not exactly like your question but wasn't there another reference question here on Asterisck about "how deep a well can be" before it's not gravitational possible to extract water? I couldn't find it but artesian wells do force water under extreme pressure to the surface. Again not exactly like your question.

I am curious to "get to the bottom" of this problem.

[Chris Peterson]

Not exactly like your question but wasn't there another reference question here on Asterisck about "how deep a well can be" before it's not gravitational possible to extract water? I couldn't find it but artesian wells do force water under extreme pressure to the surface.

A well can be 32 feet deep before it's no longer possible to extract water by suction. I don't think there's any real limit to how deep it can be if you pump from the bottom, outside of practical issues of material strength. Artesian wells exist because the water at the bottom is under higher pressure than it would be from the weight of gravity alone- pressurized by having a rock column over it, or because they are siphoning water that originates above ground level (as in mountains around a valley).

[Nitpicker]

This discussion somehow reminds me of a curious phenomenon, once described to me by a professor of fluid mechanics ...

Imagine a gas bubble exists at the bottom of a rigid container, otherwise filled with an incompressible liquid. (And we probably need to assume that the gas is immiscible with the liquid.) The pressure within the gas bubble is equal to the hydrostatic pressure of the liquid at the bottom.

Now imagine that the gas bubble is dislodged by some disturbance and floats to the top of the container.

Because the liquid is incompressible and the container is rigid, the gas bubble cannot change in volume, and so the pressure within it remains constant. Because of this, the hydrostatic pressure of the liquid increases uniformly throughout the container, by an amount equal to <liquid density>*<gravity>*<height of container>.

Liquids are typically considered incompressible from an engineering point of view. I've never actually verified this, but my professor stated that this "gas bubble phenomenon" was considered to be the cause of several oil well failures, in the early years of the oil industry, where the oil pressure was suddenly observed to increase.

(One of the few cases where the incompressibility of water cannot be assumed, is in the slight variation in water density with temperature, which I think is the main factor involved in the sea level rise expected over the coming centuries.)

[Ron-Astro Pharmacist]

I really like what I do for a living, and it's very rewarding, but sometimes my curiosity regrets not taking a different path. Since I didn't - I really appreciate the opportunity to get a bit of a second chance. Thanks – you all have satisfied many questions and endured a lot of wild fascinations!!

Now I wish the weather would improve so I could work on my skill and improve my physics knowledge of controlling dimpled flying spheres. I got a new tool – A Sky Caddie! How appropriately named for an Astro come lately.
Thanks again. Ron

[Nitpicker]

I was disappointed when certain GPS distance measuring devices were allowed under official R&A rules. Och, tis not in the spirit of the gowf.

[bystander]

Just crazy. This is the wettest spring I remember ...

Oklahoma, too. This May is the wettest month ever recorded, 16+ inches of rain in OKC. From severe drought conditions in Western OK to all the lakes and reservoirs at flood stage. The ground is so wet that half an inch of rain creates flash flood conditions. And, of course, in Oklahoma, with the severe thunder storms comes hail and tornadoes.

[geckzilla]

It's just kind of cold here. Irony: When the globe, on average, is feeling warmer, the cold spot in your country hovers over where all the politicians make their decisions.