Clouds In A Glass Of Beer

Liberally sprinkled with humor, these lessons will fascinate beginning physics students and other readers with chapters titled "On a Clear Day You Can't See Forever" and "Physics on a Manure Heap."

• Written by a critically-acclaimed natural-history author • Shares author’s fun journey to understanding clouds • Written for the curious—but non-science—minded Author Maria Mudd Ruth fell in love with clouds the same way she stumbles into most passions: madly and unexpectedly. A Sideways Look at Clouds is the story of her quite accidental infatuation with and education about the clouds above. When she moved to the soggy Northwest a decade ago, Maria assumed that locals would know everything there was to know about clouds, in the same way they talk about salmon, tides, and the Seahawks. Yet in her first two years of living in Olympia, Washington, she never heard anyone talk about clouds—only the rain. Puzzled by this lack of cloud savvy, she decided to create a 10-question online survey and sent it to everyone she knew. Her sample size of 67 people included men and women, new friends in Olympia, family on the East Coast, outdoorsy and indoorsy types, professional scientists, and liberal arts majors like herself. The results showed that while people knew a little bit about clouds, most were like her—they had a hard time identifying clouds or remembering their names. As adults, they had lost their curiosity and sense of wonder about clouds and were, essentially, not in the habit of looking up. A Sideways Look at Clouds acknowledges the challenges of understanding clouds and so uses a very steep and bumpy learning curve—the author’s—as its plot line. The book is structured around the ten words used in most definitions of a cloud: “a visible mass of water droplets or ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere above the earth.” A captivating story teller, Maria blends science, wonder, and humor to take the scenic route through the clouds and encourages readers to chart their own rambling, idiosyncratic course.

Atmospheric Thermodynamics provides a comprehensive treatment of a subject that can often be intimidating. The text analyses real-life problems and applications of the subject, alongside of guiding the reader through the fundamental basics and covering the first and second laws and the ideal gas law, followed by an emphasis on moist processes in Earth's atmosphere. Water in all its phases is a critical component of weather and the Earth's climate system. With user-friendly chapters that include energy conservation and water and its transformations, the authors write with a willingness to expose assumptions and approximations usually absent in other textbooks. History is woven into the text to provide a context for the time evolution of thermodynamics and its place in atmospheric science and demonstrating how physical reasoning leads to correct explanations of everyday phenomena. Many of the experiments described were done using inexpensive instruments to take advantage of the earth's atmosphere as a freely accessible thermodynamics library. This second edition provides updated treatments of atmospheric measurements and substantially expanded sections that include atmospheric applications of the first and second laws and energy exchange between humans and their atmospheric environment. With 400+ thought provoking problems and 350 references with annotated notes and further reading suggestions, this second edition provides a basic understanding of the fundamentals of this subject while still being a comprehensive reference guide for those working in the field of atmospheric and environmental sciences.

In this thesis, a new lidar (light detection and ranging) ceilometer capable of monitoring cloud base and sensitive to boundary layer aerosols is introduced. The key to this novelty lies in its divided-lens design that addresses a classical lidar problem of balancing transmitter-receiver overlap and signal-to-noise ratio, along with a method for characterizing overlap in the laboratory. Enhanced sensitivity in the near-range of the instrument is achieved without compromising signal-to-noise in a design that is straightforward to manufacture for broad deployment. The instrument, its optical characterization, and its performance in the field are described. The prototype instrument described here has since formed the basis of a commercial sensor for monitoring clouds and aerosols. High-resolution, continuous observations of clouds and aerosols are needed to reduce the large uncertainties in our current understanding of their influence on climate that have been highlighted by the International Panel on Climate Change. And as international health organizations indicate growing public health threats over the coming decades resulting from poor air quality, extensive aerosol monitoring is required to assess personal exposure to and the health impacts of anthropogenic particulates. Ground-based optical remote sensing measurements made by well-characterized instruments, such as that described in these pages, are critical to this.

Reproduction of the original.

A 24-hour practical guide to skywatching.

This three-volume A-to-Z compendium consists of over 300 entries written by a team of leading international scholars and researchers working in the field. Authoritative and up-to-date, the encyclopedia covers the processes that produce our weather, important scientific concepts, the history of ideas underlying the atmospheric sciences, biographical accounts of those who have made significant contributions to climatology and meteorology and particular weather events, from extreme tropical cyclones and tornadoes to local winds.

Children ask, "Why is the sky blue?" but the question also puzzled Plato, Leonardo,and even Newton, who unlocked so many other secrets. The search for an answer continued forcenturies; in 1862 Sir John Herschel listed the color and polarization of sky light as "the twogreat standing enigmas of meteorology." In Sky in a Bottle, Peter Pesic takes us on a quest to theheart of this mystery, tracing the various attempts of science, history, and art to solve it. Hebegins with the scholars of the ancient world and continues through the natural philosophers of theEnlightenment, the empiricists of the scientific revolution, and beyond. The cast of charactersincludes Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Descartes, Euler, Saussure, Goethe, Rayleigh, andEinstein; but the protagonist is the question itself, and the story tells how we have tried toanswer it.Pesic's odyssey introduces us to central ideas of chemistry, optics, and atomic physics.He describes the polarization of light, Rayleigh scattering, and connections between the appearanceof the sky and Avogadro's number. He discusses changing representations of the sky in art, from newstyles of painting to new pigments that created new colors for paint. He considers what the sky'snighttime brightness might tell us about the size and density of the universe. And Pesic asksanother, daring, question: Can we put the sky in a bottle? Can we recreate and understand itsblueness here on earth? This puzzle, he says, opens larger perspectives; questions of the color andbrightness of the sky touch on secrets of matter and light, the scope of the universe in space andtime, the destiny of the earth, and deep human feelings.