[EnviroEngr]

Alright; now ya made me do it. I had to haul this all the way over to here so it would get played with.

Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2005 7:09 pm
Post subject: T-Dyne

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Jack wrote:

...
It's hard to say if it's the "beginning of the end"; but I do believe the weather is becoming more volatile. Perhaps due to global warming...

Maybe pup55 or Monte can help out here. When X teraWatts 'build up' in a dynamic (partially closed?) System [of systems] the size of the Earth, by what degree does the entropy or turbulence increase? I've been meaning to layout a series of TDynamic ='s in MathCad to see how wild normally stable outputs get when kinetic energies increase in a simple-model elastic system by some amount X. Do either of you have a guess?
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Honestly, though. I've been suffering with a log jam in my brain over this one. What kind and how much more turbulence will there be in atmospheric systems if you keep loading them up with ever more thermal energy. Somebody must have a clue.

[Jack]

I suspect this is something that we don't have a clue about - quite seriously.

First, we need to determine the energy balance. How much comes into the system, and how much departs. The primary input is solar, of course - but the amount retained is changed by lots of things (as you know better than I!). How does moisture, dust, cloud cover, and all the rest change things? As nearly as I can tell, this is all open for research.

Next, we have a dynamic gas flow system. What causes the wind to blow, at various altitudes and diverse locations, as it does? If the temperature goes up 0.1 degrees centigrade, what happens?

I rather doubt we have any real models. I say that because weather reports use models, and they're often very wrong....

One school of thought is that man is so inconsequential relative to the Earth that what we do doesn't really affect things. But when we start looking at the amount of hydrocarbons added to the atmosphere annually, I get this nasty feeling that we're conducting a grand experiment without knowing the consequences. Sorta like a bunch of kids with a pipe and a bunch of match heads. Let's hope our experiment doesn't end in tragedy.

[EnviroEngr]

Pretty tall order then?

Devil, care to hazard a guess?

I can intuit the local scale chaos, i.e., more "hot spots" of activity 'equilibriating' themselves in the form of bigger hail stones (like the 11" one in Nebraska a few years ago), tornadoes, hurricanes, etc. Even if the sum total of the violence stays the same or even decreases overall or by region, my gut says local phenomena will be more severe.

I would like to back up that intuition with some equations (nested matrices maybe) that show the tendency for more eruptive type events vis a vis higher potential energy extant in a given air-space.

[Jack]

I think it's a very tall order....here's a little bit of information -

Weather modeling

[pup55]

use the ideal gas law, pv=nrt.

Instead of P being pressure, define it as "number of occurrences of anomalous weather". Example: number of occurrences in a given year of a 2-sigma deviation from mean temperature for a given observation point. the NOAA website has plenty of daily temperature data that goes back decades. Also, pretty easy to find multiple observation points.

n and v might be the density and volume of the troposphere. I am not sure if this varies from year to year, or is more or less constant over time. Data for this should be available as far back as the beginning of the satellite era.

T would be the global mean temperature for a given year.

You should try to deduce R from the data sets above by least squares or linear regression. R normally is the ideal gas constant. Once you know it, though, you should be able to predict future anomolous weather occurrences in a particular year given various increases in T, adjusted with the fudge factor R. R, in this model, might not be a constant--it may be non-linear or a time-dependent function based on sunspots or laNina/ElNino oscillator for example. In any case, if you have good curve-plotting software, you should be able to calculate it from the rest of the data set if it is a function.

Once you have a time-dependent understanding of R, an easy matter to forecast based on different levels of T.

Smiley might be the person to consult for advice on this. Maybe some other gas-related equation would be more appropriate. Most all are derived from the ideal gas law, though, so this simple case might be sufficient.

Be sure to post your findings. You have us all curious now!

[MonteQuest]

Yes, tall order. All of our climate models have been leaving out a major new factor to the equation. Global Dimming. Until this new variant is factored in, analyzed and debated, we are all just guessing. For instance, Global Dimming is now being viewed as the cause of the Ethiopian famine in 1984.

[Jack]

I think the problem may be more challenging than the ideal gas law. More likely, we need to consider dynamic turbulent flow...and that's computationally intensive, even for very simplified models.

Montequest points out that dimming needs to be considered, but so does CO2 level, moisture, and other greenhouse gasses. On the other hand, albedo of various places might be an issue, especially since it will change as plant coverage and populations change.

We know that glaciers are retreating, so that means less ice. Less ice might mean more warming....

And all of this will vary with altitude. Clearly, a change in the gulf stream will have effects; but that's high up.

Seriously, I suspect you could keep platoons of weather scientists, mathematicians, and computer scientists busy for decades on the research. Assuming, of course, that we have decades.

[pup55]

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hb ... em.html#c3

You're probably right, of course.

This equation is kind of interesting. It gives the velocity distribution of a gas based on pressure and temperature. Might be useful at some level.

[EnviroEngr]

Just got this week's issue of Science. In it, on page 497, Richard A. Kerr noted some of the parametrics feed into the various scenarios. They sound quite a bit like what I'm thinking about. Perhaps I can contact the folks at climateprediction.net and see if they've been down this road. It seems likely.

www.sciencemag.org

Member Link:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/s ... /5709/497a

[EnviroEngr]

Here's the snip that's got me thinking:

"Now comes modeler David Stainforth of the University of Oxford, U.K., and 15 colleagues with their pumped-up version of the perturbed-parameter approach. In a similar study reported at last summer's workshop and in Nature, James Murphy of the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, U.K., and colleagues altered 29 model variables that control physical properties such as the behavior of clouds, atmospheric convection, and winds. Given their available computing resources, they had to perturb only one parameter at a time for a total of 53 simulations. In order to extrapolate their results into the high-sensitivity range, they had to assume that changes in two parameters simply add up."

[TWilliam]

While modeling is certainly a fascinating study, I sometimes can't help but wonder why we humans get so caught up in needing to 'prove' things we already know intuitively. I don't need an engineering degree and a bunch of complex mathematics to tell me that turning the burner up on the stove will cause the pot to boil more vigorously...

[EnviroEngr]

..., I sometimes can't help but wonder why we humans get so caught up in needing to 'prove' things we already know intuitively. ...

I can help you out with that one. Although intuition is a valid in-road to knowledge, in my own personal experience, calibrating it to provide correct information consistently has been bewilderingly tricky. I'm one for using both hemispheres. The right hemisphere conjures intuitive impressions while the left side verifies the applicability and validity of the impressions passed to it. Relying on intuition alone is a sure recipe for disaster. Working through issues logically-literally provides insights intuition alone will usually not offer up. It's the solid construction of reasoning combined with gut-feel that more often successfully carries the day.

That reminds me, I need to put up Map 29 "The Lateral Thinking of Edward De Bono" and Map 23 "The Mind-Splitters: The left and right hemispheres of the brain" on http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic311-0-asc-15.html

[pilferage]

When X teraWatts 'build up' in a dynamic (partially closed?) System [of systems] the size of the Earth, by what degree does the entropy or turbulence increase?

Check out the bottom of this page,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
The heat capacity of our atmosphere at various pressures and temperatures is available, and we could pick as many intermediate states as we'd like. One nice property is that the volume would remain relatively constant since intuitively the "size" of our atmosphere is mostly a function of gravity, it's not like water where you have significant electrostatic forces.

What kind and how much more turbulence will there be in atmospheric systems if you keep loading them up with ever more thermal energy. Somebody must have a clue.

This one's much tougher... like Jack said, there are tons of variables...
change in albedo, CO2, particulates, and the cyclic oceanic/weather patterns we have.
Generally, it seems that if we manage to reduce or stop the various oceanic heat conveyors (which might screw up atmosphereic ones)... we'll see a large scale shift to exaggerated regional climates.

[TWilliam]

..., I sometimes can't help but wonder why we humans get so caught up in needing to 'prove' things we already know intuitively. ...

I can help you out with that one. Although intuition is a valid in-road to knowledge, in my own personal experience, calibrating it to provide correct information consistently has been bewilderingly tricky. I'm one for using both hemispheres. The right hemisphere conjures intuitive impressions while the left side verifies the applicability and validity of the impressions passed to it. Relying on intuition alone is a sure recipe for disaster. Working through issues logically-literally provides insights intuition alone will usually not offer up. It's the solid construction of reasoning combined with gut-feel that more often successfully carries the day.

Hmmm... thanks EE.

Don't get me wrong; I too believe in using both hemispheres. I guess what I'm thinking about is not so much the actual quantifying of the empirical evidence provided by our senses; that is certainly useful in many applications. It's more what I perceive as an almost rabid need for us to be able to quantify it before we'll accept it's reality.

I get the impression that this is perhaps a result of our collective discounting of our intuitive faculties. Going back to my example of the boiling pot, our senses show us the empirical result of turning up the heat, and normally we'd simply intuit "more heat = greater agitation". But because of our modern disdain for "mere intuition", our response is "that's not good enough; PROVE it, and if you can't then I'll just turn up the heat as high as I like", resultant mess be damned.

This seems to me to be exactly what we're doing regarding the environment. I think we all know intuitively that humans do impact the environment, including the weather, but because no one can spell out in black and white precisely which methane emission from which particular sphincter generated that particular tornado, we simply pretend it's not really an issue, and thereby conveniently sidestep responsibility for our actions.

[EnviroEngr]

Oh!
Exactly!! I got what you're saying. You may want to launch a search on my acrimony for Materialist Reductionism or Positivism on this site. Rumor has it that during and shortly after the Third Reich, 'scientists' fancied themselves God's appointed tamers of the nastiest bitch of them all: Nature! Chances are you know the rest.

You put your finger dead-on the 'social culture' issue behind our science-o-philiac obsessions with 'paralysis by analysis' run-ons. I would loosely qualify this disaster as derivative to our numerous mental embolisms cloaked in the facade of triumphant discoveries and victories.

To get a taste of the utterly Limbic megalomania masquerading as 'excellence and laudable achievement', consider the recent case of the discovery and taxonomy of a variant of the coronavirus: "Yale researchers have discovered a new cousin of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus that causes disease in children. Or have they?
The team has christened the agent 'New Haven,' and a paper published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases (JID) last week describes it as 'a novel coronavirus.' But the team admits it's the spitting image of a virus reported by Dutch researchers last year, and the paper has irked some virologists who see nothing new.
To complicate matters, the same virus was discovered and reported by not one, but two Dutch research groups last year. Each gave the virus its own name, and the two are still quibbling over who discovered it first."

Do we really a) have time for this bullshit, b) need to celebrate 'science' when it frequently behaves this way and then vehemently denies it in the same breath? I think not. Just as you do.

Good observation, and yes -- there's both an elephant and a naked emperor in the living room.

[Devil]

Pretty tall order then?

Devil, care to hazard a guess?

I can intuit the local scale chaos, i.e., more "hot spots" of activity 'equilibriating' themselves in the form of bigger hail stones (like the 11" one in Nebraska a few years ago), tornadoes, hurricanes, etc. Even if the sum total of the violence stays the same or even decreases overall or by region, my gut says local phenomena will be more severe.

I would like to back up that intuition with some equations (nested matrices maybe) that show the tendency for more eruptive type events vis a vis higher potential energy extant in a given air-space.

I don't frequent this forum, but have been dragged in by my hair. I've carefully read this thread and don't have anything significant to add, even though I've been working with atmospheric sciences for some time. The problem is converting climate modelling to weather modelling, from a global to a local scale. For example, at one given moment, a tornado may affect only an area a hundred metres or so across. This is negligible on a global scale where the climate modelling uses a grid of 200 km in X and Y and 500 m in Z. However, the guy whose timber-frame house is squarely in the path of the tornado won't say it is negligible.

What we do know is that climate change modelling is now reasonably accurate, despite the coarse grid (it would be nice to use a 1 km x 1 km x 50 m grid, if only we had supercomputers a million times more powerful). Let me tell you something I've been directly involved in, just to show you how approximate our lack of computing power allows. We have been trying to model the transport of ozone-depleting substances with a short atmospheric residence time up to the stratospheric ozone layer, since 1996. Quite apart from estimating the hydrolytic and photolytic breakdown of the substances under varying climatic and weather conditions, some very gross estimations have to be made. For example, with the seasons, the Intertropical Convergence Zone, which provides the major tropospheric transport mechanism, changes latitude. In the peak Northern summer, it sits squarely over the Tropic of Cancer and so affects latitudes from, say, 10°N to 35°N. Over most of the globe, the so-called Trade Winds blow inwards towards the centre, where the violent uplift of the Hadley Cell occurs. However, there is an area of exception, round South Asia, where the monsoon blows in a diametrically opposed direction to the NE trade winds. For lack of computing power, we cannot model in the effect of the monsoons on the transport of these substances. As a result, the guestimations of the effect of emissions from the Indian subcontinent will be too high in summer and too low in winter (when the NE monsoon will tend to blow the substances into the trade wind area). Nor have orographic influences been modelled in. I mention this as an illustration that precise predictions are impossible at this time. This is also why weather forecasting is still only about 90% accurate in what will happen over a 24 hour period, but 60% accurate about when it will happen (e.g., the passage of a weather front). Yet more supercomputing power is devoted to weather than anything else on earth.

As far as climate is concerned, the modelling is so coarse, unlike weather, which may work on a finer grid in some regions, that there is no way we can predict what effects climate change can produce with anything better than 20% or 30% accuracy. We do know that there is more energy being taken up into the atmosphere and we do know that this will cause more extremes in weather, but we have not the slightest clue about when and where. The fact that we have seen more hurricanes and more extreme winter weather in many regions is possibly a manifestation of the problem, but we cannot be categorical about cause an effect. We can be more categorical, from observations, that the global average temperature has increased over the past century and a half and we have convincing circumstantial evidence that the cause of this has been partially due to anthropogenic emissions of grennhouse gases and partially from natural phenomena. Over the past 50 years, the correlation of the man-made emissions to the temperature rise has been amazingly well-fitted.

So, I'm not going to stick my neck out to say that the snowfall in New England and Europe over the past few weeks is a result of climate change, although it may well be, just as much as a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa was the cause of Hurricane Andrew! All I'll say is that we can expect more extremes of weather as the global temperature rises.

This is a one-off intervention in this forum, as a result of a specific request that I contribute. I'll not even systematically monitor any resultant discussion. I hope it helps, even if I'm helpless to give you any positive information.

[Liamj]

Thought relevant, as an application of this kind of thinking.

--

Could wind generators slow climate mixing and the arctic thaw?
by Michael Lucking 17Mar05

On Dec.17, 2004, The scientific article, Methane Burps: Ticking Time Bomb by John Atcheson, was republished on EnergyBulletin. In John’s article, he predicts a dire future with the thawing and release of methane from the frozen arctic tundra due to global warming. This methane release is, by far, the biggest threat to life on earth as a result of global warming. Surprisingly, it received no reader comments. Here is my comment.

This methane thawing problem is accelerated by the fact that the arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet. An average arctic warming of 3 degrees Centigrade is 4 times greater than the world average warming of 0.7 degrees Centigrade. The explanation for this accelerated arctic warming is Increased Global Climate Mixing.

As storms increase, the atmospheric mixing increases which results in a more even global temperature and a rise in the Arctic temperature. It is just like stirring the soup on the stove, the hot soup near the bottom of the pot mixes with the cooler soup at the top. As a result, the soup temperature evens and gets hotter at the top. The increase in Global Climate Mixing might be as small as 1% or 2% but the result may be the 4 times temperature increase in the arctic. ...more
http://www.energybulletin.net/4772.html