Questions tagged [water-vapour]
Questions concerning the gaseous phase of water
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What is the role of stratospheric water vapor emissions in climate change?
Water vapor is the most significant greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere. However, tropospheric water vapor has a short atmospheric half-life. Therefore, anthropogenic surface-level water vapor ...
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Why atmospheric temperature lapse rate doesn't have a discontinuity at 0°C when ice is formed?
When trying to calculate the adiabatic lapse rate of moist air based on known values of basic thermodynamic properties of the constituents (ice, water, vapor,...) I came to the following question:
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How much fresh water could be produced by pumping warm humid air through a pipeline up to the top of a mountain?
I have been doing a lot of research on the Internet lately about various desalination processes which are being used today and this led me to begin studying about mountain weather and the orographic ...
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How can I calculate integrated water vapor transport (IVT) in NCL, R or Python?
I have netcdf (ERA5) file (u and v component of wind and specific humidity) between years 1970-2022. Are there any package or script documentation about that?
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How much water is the atmosphere receiving
I was reading this Question earlier about how if water is getting lost into space and one of the answers said that (paraphrase) the Earth lost about enough water for the oceans to reduce by 12 cm, if ...
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Change in vapour pressure due to climate change
I was just wondering how much the vapour pressure has changed due to climate change. Because with changing temperatures, the vapour pressure also changes; this is described by the Clausius-Clapeyron ...
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How does water vapor cool the troposphere?
I have read about the Fixed Anvil Temperature (FAT) hypothesis and wonder why radiative cooling decreases with decreasing water vapor mixing ratio.
Doesn't this stand in contrast with the fact, that ...
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Would covering part of Lake Mead with large sheets of bubble wrap reduce the amount of water lost to evaporation?
I have been recently thinking about how the water level of Lake Mead keeps dropping due to its high water evaporation rate brought on by recent years of historical drought conditions. The continuous ...
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Does saturation mixing ratio change during adiabatic ascent/descent?
Does saturation mixing ratio change during adiabatic ascent/descent? I think the mixing ratio ($r_v = \rho_v/\rho_d$) is constant as long as no water vapor is condensed out, but saturation mixing ...
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How is weather formation prevented in the stratosphere?
Water diffuses from an area of high concentration to an area of low concentration.
By that principle, I would expect water from the troposphere to diffuse into the stratosphere, where water content ...
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Could irrigation stop the Santa Ana winds?
The Santa Ana winds flow down mountain slopes, growing ever hotter as they descend. To my amazement, popular explanations of these winds even attribute them to specific mountain passes. Suppose for ...
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Is there really precipitation on Mars? Does frost count?
The NASA Goddard science education page answer to Reading about Mars, I noticed that it has .03% of water vapor in it's atmosphere, and my question was if it has water vapor why doesn't it have ...
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How to interpret the negative (actual) evapotranspiration values?
I am exploring FLUXNET sites for actual evapotranspiration (ETP) data (I convert the energy balance closure-corrected latent heat to ETP).
I am interested in the half-hourly data. During the night we ...
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What does supersaturation with respect to ice mean?
I've been reading about the Bergeron process, a process that generates much of the precipitation in the middle latitudes by generating ice crystals at the expense of water droplets. The part I don't ...
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Time for water vapor to generate more greenhouse effect than latent heat?
I have an argument with a climate change denier.
He says the rise of water vapor in the atmosphere causes a "much larger" cooling effect by taking vaporisation heat from the ground than the ...
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Yearly changes of solar irradiation and atmospheric feedback
I think I understand the mechanism of water vapor feedback in climate change pretty well: a (theoretical) temperature increase due to some isolated factor (e.g. increase in $CO_2$ concentration) ...
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Water vapor content versus specific humidity
I am wondering the difference between water vapor content and specific humidity to determine the moisture availability in the atmosphere. Which one is more acceptable variable to determine the ...
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Has there ever been a study done on the effect of steam/thermal pollution on climate [duplicate]
Most people are well aware of the idea of greenhouse warming. Carbon dioxide receives particular attention, do to the uncertainty of sources, sinks, and inert properties. However, combustion, which ...
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Why (actually) is the night sky so bright in the city? How far up is that happening?
The recent news reported by the New York Times, the BBC and the NPR web sites (for example) as well as in the Iceland Review and Iceland Magazine sites, about the shutting-off of Reykjavik's ...
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How to calculate water vapor flux divergence from temperature, relative humidity, u wind and v wind?
I have temperature, u wind, v wind and relative humidity. I am wondering to calculate water vapor flux divergence and convergence.
Would anybody kindly help to find our a solution for this?
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Cooling effect by evaporation [closed]
Why exactly does water cool down by evaporation? What happens in this process?
How much does it cool down? What's the formula to describe this process?
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Is there any experiment to prove that CO2 with the atmosphere concentration can have greenhouse effect?
All gas molecules have the capability to absorb radiation energy. $\rm{CO}_2$ has much less capability to absorb radiation energy, comparing with water vapor.
In Earth's atmosphere currently $\rm{CO}...
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Why does dew accumlate on only one side of my car?
Many days I walk out to my car to go to work and notice my windows are fogged up, I believe due to dew (haha homophones). When I am at my mother's house(O'Fallon, MO), all Windows get fogged up. When ...
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How does evapotranspiration affect rainfall?
Evapotranspiration is when a plant evaporates water off the surface of its leaves in order to move water throughout its system with cohesive and adheisiveforces. My question is how will a sudden ...
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Evaporation loss formulas
A while ago I created a spreadsheet to calculate evaporation loss. I found several formulas to do that, two from Kevin Rafferty and one from Engineering Toolbox. The one from Engineering Toolbox was ...
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What is the life-cycle of agricultural water used to grow crops/animals?
A là this Slate article:
1 gallon of water is required to grow a single almond
220 gallons to grow a large avocado
5,000 gallons to grow 1 lb of beef
None of these things weighs anywhere near ...
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Where does the water from rain in rain forests come from?
When discussing a hypothetical world without oceans and just forest it occured to me that I wasn't so sure there would be any rain in the first place, due to the lack of oceans. Searching on Google ...
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Does the gravitational pull of the moon affect the composition of Earth's atmosphere?
In particular, does the pull of the moon affect the amount of water vapour in the Earth's atmosphere? In other words, if the moon were larger, or orbiting more closely to the earth, would the ...
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Regarding the melting glaciers and icebergs, why isn't the extra water vapor in the atmosphere mentioned in discussions of global warming?
As is reported on the major news networks, many glaciers and big icebergs are melting, which reportedly causes a tremendous increase in the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.
Now a lot of ...
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