Useful Chart for earth.nullschool

I’ve played with the earth.nullschool thing for a few years now. It gives you atmosphere level choices measured in hPa of pressure. Kind of cryptic, IMHO. I’ve frequently wanted a way to figure out which hPa was the top of the troposphere (where convection turns into a high speed wind to the cold poles). Well, I finally found it, Or more accurately: I finally got motivated enough to go looking ;-)

http://weatherfaqs.org.uk/book/export/html/174

International Standard Atmosphere (ISA) and Pressure Settings

Based on the International Standard Atmosphere for dry air (ICAO 1964), which is defined as under:-

1. At mean sea level (msl), the pressure = 1013.25 hPa and temperature = 15.0 degC
2. From msl to 11 km, a decrease in temperature (or lapse rate) of 6.5 degC/km
3. From 11 km to 20 km, the temperature is held to be isothermal (not changing) at a value of – 56.5 degC
4. From 20 km to 32 km, an increase in temperature of about 1 degC/km

hPa (mbar) ......... height (metres) ......... height (feet) ......... temperature (degC)
»...... 10 ................... 31 055 ................ 101 885 ................. -45.4
»...... 20 ................... 26 481 .................. 86 881 ................. -50.0
»...... 30 ................... 23 849 .................. 78 244 ................. -52.7
»...... 40 ................... 22 000 .................. 72 177 ................. -54.5
»...... 50 ................... 20 576 .................. 67 507 ................. -55.9
»...... 70 ................... 18 442 .................. 60 504 ................. -56.5
».... 100 ................... 16 180 .................. 53 083 ................. -56.5
».... 150 ................... 13 608 .................. 44 647 ................. -56.5
».... 200 ................... 11 784 .................. 38 662 ................. -56.5
»... (226/ISA TROP.. 11 000 .................. 36 091 ................. -56.5)
».... 250 ................... 10 363 .................. 33 999 ................. -52.3
».... 300 ..................... 9 164 .................. 30 065 ................. -44.5
».... 400 ..................... 7 185 .................. 23 574 ................. -31.7
».... 500 ..................... 5 574 .................. 18 289 ................. -21.2
».... 600 ..................... 4 206 .................. 13 801 ................. -12.3
».... 700 ..................... 3 012 .................... 9 882 ................... -4.6
».... 800 ..................... 1 949 .................... 6 394 ..................... 2.3
».... 850 ..................... 1 457 .................... 4 781 ..................... 5.5
».... 900 ........................ 988 .................... 3 243 ..................... 8.6
».... 950 ........................ 540 .................... 1 773 ................... 11.5
».. 1000 ........................ 111 ....................... 364 ................... 14.3
». (1013.25/ISA MSL ....... 0 ........................... 0 ................... 15.0)
».. 1050 ...................... - 302 .................... - 989 ................... 17.0

You can quickly see that the tropopause sets in about 225 hPa and transitions to the stratosphere at about 70 hPa.

So things below 225 are convective (generally, it will be lower at the poles as low as 700 hPa) while things 70 and above are well out of the convective reach and indicate high altitude global circulation.

At earth.nullschool, you can now pick hPa levels and have a clue what regime of atmosphere you are inspecting.

https://earth.nullschool.net/

Click on the “Earth” word down in the lower left to get the controls:

earth

Date | 2017-10-12 17:00 Local ⇄ UTC
Data | Wind @ Surface
Scale |
Source | GFS / NCEP / US National Weather Service
Control | Now
⊕Grid▷HD
Mode | Air – Ocean – Chem – Particulates
Height | Sfc – 1000 – 850 – 700 – 500 – 250 – 70 – 10 hPa
Overlay | Wind – Temp – RH – WPD – 3HPA – CAPE
| TPW – TCW – MSLP – MI – None
Projection | A – AE – CE – E – O – P – S – WB – W3
about

Note that “Height:” is in hPa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troposphere

The troposphere is the lowest portion of Earth’s atmosphere, and is also where nearly all weather conditions take place. It contains approximately 75% of the atmosphere’s mass and 99% of the total mass of water vapor and aerosols. The average depths of the troposphere are 20 km (12 mi) in the tropics, 17 km (11 mi) in the mid latitudes, and 7 km (4.3 mi) in the polar regions in winter. The lowest part of the troposphere, where friction with the Earth’s surface influences air flow, is the planetary boundary layer. This layer is typically a few hundred meters to 2 km (1.2 mi) deep depending on the landform and time of day. Atop the troposphere is the tropopause, which is the border between the troposphere and stratosphere. The tropopause is an inversion layer, where the air temperature ceases to decrease with height and remains constant through its thickness.

The word troposphere derives from the Greek: tropos for “turn, turn toward, trope” and “-sphere” (as in, the Earth), reflecting the fact that rotational turbulent mixing plays an important role in the troposphere’s structure and behaviour. Most of the phenomena associated with day-to-day weather occur in the troposphere.

So at the tropics, we’re looking for 20 km or 12 miles that our chart says is about 50 hPa while at the poles it is down to 7 km or 4.3 miles that works out to about 400 hPa.

Since earth.nullschool is not giving use that granularity, we can roughly use the 70 hPa for equatorial stratosphere and below that for troposphere – 250 hPa. While at the poles, we can drop down to 500 hPa for the tropopause.

Hopefully that will make it easier to interpret their nice visuals…

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Thermopylae vs Sea Level Rise

This is a point I’ve made before, but mostly with reference to local areas like Alviso, where once Liberty Ships were launched and now it is a salt marsh / mud flat. Boston and San Franciso also have a history of water turning to land. But here’s an example of a place where it is quite obvious.

Thermopylae. Where The 300 held off the Persians for 3 days.

The Wiki says it is all due to sedimentation. Since there are many other historic ports around Turkey and Italy that were once sea level, now found miles inland, I suspect some amount of land uplift or ocean level drop is also involved. But even if it is “only” sedimentation; what happens when that much sediment is put in a bowl full of water? It displaces water to somewhere else and the overall level rises naturally. For the global ocean, this is offset some by subduction, plate spreading, and mountain building processes. Accounting for all that to find a net sea level change due to any one cause is just folly.

But on to Thermopylae:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermopylae

The land is dominated by the coastal floodplain of the Spercheios River and is surrounded by sloping forested limestone mountains. There is continuous deposition of sediment from the river and travertine deposits from the hot springs which has substantially altered the landscape during the past few thousand years. The land surface on which the famous Battle of Thermopylae was fought in 480 BC is now buried under 20 metres (66 ft) of soil. The shoreline has also advanced over the centuries because of the sedimentary deposition. The level of the Malian Gulf was also significantly higher during prehistoric times and the Spercheios River was significantly shorter. Its shoreline advanced by up to 2 kilometers between 2500 BC and 480 BC but still has left several extremely narrow passages between the sea and the mountains. The narrowest point on the plain, where the Battle of Thermopylae was probably fought, would have been less than 100 metres (330 ft) wide. Between 480 BC and the 21st century, the shoreline advanced by as much as 9 km (5.6 mi) in places, eliminating the narrowest points of the pass and considerably increasing the size of the plain around the outlet of the Spercheios.

So, golly, sea level changes all by itself, often by a lot. If the sea is not rising fairly fast, erosion fills in the shore and the sea retreats. Hmmm…. Not the narrative we’re being sold, is it.

2016 – 480 = 2496 years. 2000 cm / 1536 yr = 0.8 cm / year of “soil rise”.

Tell me again why a cm / century or so of “sea level rise” matters in that context?

Now also note that statement of shoreline movement between 2500 BC and 480 BC. What was happening then?

Climate, Volcanoes and History

Oh, gee, there was a big hot mountain and then it dropped into a cold bit for the Greek era. (I note in passing that Greece was founded by Ionians and Dorians migrating southward in a hurry… wonder if they were running away from the encroaching cold further north?). So let’s see, it was hotter, and the water was much higher in the pass, then it got colder, and the water dropped, but now the water is farther away, but it’s because sedimentation has overwhelmed all our spectacular heat?

“I don’t think so, Tim… ”

It looks to me like folks are just not accounting for the actual changes of historical temperatures very well. Sure some of it, maybe even most of it, is sedimentation (a bit of core sampling would be in order, IMHO, to get real data on prior floor level). But just as clearly, the pre-historic runs back and forth of the shoreline are not due to humans. My speculation would be that our “run up” from that deep cold bucket of the Little Ice Age is in fact not as high as we think (or that chart plots).

Here’s an interesting map from the wiki:

Thermopylae and Malian Gulf shoreline

So shorelines move 10 or 15 km all on their own naturally. This means it’s my fault if it moves a foot just how again? Shorelines are living dynamic things. Most often sedimentation moves shorelines outward. Sometimes it moves inward. Mostly it wobbles back and forth in about the same areas, as attested by lots of erosion features both above and below present shorelines globally. The quest for a fixed immobile shoreline is folly of the tilting at windmills kind.

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Tips – October 2017

About “Tips”:

While I’m mostly interested in things having to do with:

Making money, usually via trading
Weather and climate (“Global Warming” & “Climate Change”)
Quakes, Volcanoes, and other Earth Sciences
Current economic and political events
(often as those last three have impact on the first one…)
And just about any ‘way cool’ interesting science or technology

If something else is interesting to you, put a “tip” here as you like.

If there is a current Hot Topic for active discussion, try one of the Weekly Occasional Open Discussion pages here:

https://chiefio.wordpress.com/category/w-o-o-d/

You can also look at the list of “Categories” on the right hand side and get an idea of any other broad area of interest.

This ought not to be seen as a “limit” on what is “interesting”, more as a “focus list” with other things that are interesting being fair game as well.

The History:

Note that “pages” are the things reached from links on the top bar just under the pretty picture. “Postings” are reached from the listing along the right side of any given article (posting).

Since WordPress has decided that comments on Pages, like the Old Tips Pages, won’t show up in recent comments, it kind of breaks the value of it for me. In response, I shifted from a set of “pages” to a set of “postings”. As any given Tips Posting gets full, I’ll add a new one.

I have kept the same general format, with the T page (top bar) still pointing to both the archive of Tips Pages as well as the series of new Postings via a link to the TIPS category.

This is the next posting from prior Tips postings. Same idea, just a new set of space to put pointers to things of interest. The most immediately preceding Tips posting is: https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2017/09/08/tips-september-2017.

The generic “T” parent page remains up top, where older copies of the various “Tips” pages can be found archived. The Tips category (see list at right) marks Tips postings for easy location.

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W.O.O.D. – 10 October 2017

This is another of the W.O.O.D. series of semi-regular
Weekly Occasional Open Discussions.
(i.e. if I forget and skip one, no big)

Immediate prior one here:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2017/09/15/w-o-o-d-15-sept-2017/#comment-87367
and remains open for threads running there
(at least until the ‘several month’ auto-close of comments on stale threads).

Cannonical list of old ones here: https://chiefio.wordpress.com/category/w-o-o-d/

So use “Tips” for “Oooh, look at the interesting ponder thing!”
and “W.O.O.D” for “Did you see what just happened?! What did you think about it?”

For this week, I’m going to toss 4 topics in the hopper.

1) North Korea: Is Trump just rattling their cage with his cagey comments, or is something afoot?

2) Starting to see reports of Frost Harvest Failures from Europe / Asia. Wonder how it’s going in other parts of the world like South America and Australia / New Zealand…

3) Is it time to look at LENR again? A couple of stories:

http://e-catworld.com/2017/08/23/mizuno-claims-production-of-excess-energy-that-far-exceeds-input-in-new-lenr-experiments/

Mizuno Claims Production of Excess Energy that ‘Far Exceeds Input’ in New LENR Experiments
Posted on August 23, 2017
[…]
As a result, energy far exceeding input was continuously obtained. In the best results obtained thus far, the output thermal energy is double the input electrical energy, amounting to several hundred watts. The generated thermal energy follows an exponential temperature function. When the reactor temperature is 300°C, the generated energy is 1 kW.

When it’s kw scale and the output is double the input it isn’t subtile details of calorimetry technique… The Japanese are pretty hung up on not ‘losing face’ or being a screw up.

OTOH, I’m not quite able to swallow another “next year” and “no you can’t touch it” from eCat and Rossi:

http://e-catworld.com/2017/09/04/rossi-first-e-cat-plants-under-construction-will-sell-energy-not-plants/

Rossi: First E-Cat Plants Under Construction, Will Sell Energy, Not Plants.
Posted on September 4, 2017
[…]
Frank Acland
September 3, 2017 at 8:55 PM
Dear Andrea,

You say that your the first plants that you sell will be managed directly by you.

a) Can you explain what you mean by that?
b) Have you any agreements to build plants for customers yet?

Andrea Rossi
September 3, 2017 at 9:32 PM
Frank Acland:
a) that we will operate the plant and the Customer will not have access to the reactors
b) yes
Warm Regards,
A.R.

Frank Acland
September 3, 2017 at 10:50 PM
Dear Andrea,

Very interesting that you have agreements to build plants already.
a) Have you started building them yet?
b) When do you expect to have them completed?
c) Will you be selling the plant, or selling energy with these first plants?

Andrea Rossi
September 4, 2017 at 6:32 AM
Frank Acland:
a) yes
b) confidential
C) energy
Warm Regards,
A.R.

I’ve reached the “I’ll believe it when the State University has one running the campus and the Ph.D. Physics Department is conducting tours” stage – and even then only when 2 or 3 campuses of different schools are doing it… A decade or two ago I would have said “When he is awarded the Nobel Prize”, but given what they’ve been doing lately, I’m thinking that would indicate it was a put-up-job…

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