Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics

[dannc]

Originally Posted by CaptTom

...
We're conditioned to think in binary. Yes or no. Black or white. Believe or dis-believe. Liberal or Conservative....

Interesting comment.

Are we really conditioned to 1 and 0? Politically, that is what has happened, though not planned, in the US. Overseas, things are more grey. Moving away from the politics, I don't see the world as binary but mostly grey. It is the area between black and white where we exist most of the time. Most decisions I have made have not been without uncertainty. Simple decisions like Should I Stay or Should I Go have always been full of grey. One eventually has to decide which path to take but the decisions is often, at least for me, full of grey, not any certainty of black or white. But at some point a decision is made....

I used to work with a guy, who has since died, who went through life looking at the world as black or white, which was not good in general but also because one of his jobs was not full of certainty. The job, like life, was full of grey.

One of the best TV series ever created was Babylon 5. One of the races had rulers called the Grey Council. Their saying was,

"I am Grey. I stand between the candle and the star. We are Grey. We stand between the darkness and the light."

They would meet in an empty room where there was only light in the middle of the space and surrounded by darkness. The Gray Council would stand in they area in between the light and darkness, the grey zone, thus their title and reality.

Maybe life is more quantum than we think.

Later,
Dan

[Chotu]

Originally Posted by dannc

Interesting comment.

Are we really conditioned to 1 and 0? Politically, that is what has happened, though not planned, in the US. Overseas, things are more grey. Moving away from the politics, I don't see the world as binary but mostly grey. It is the area between black and white where we exist most of the time. Most decisions I have made have not been without uncertainty. Simple decisions like Should I Stay or Should I Go have always been full of grey. One eventually has to decide which path to take but the decisions is often, at least for me, full of grey, not any certainty of black or white. But at some point a decision is made....

I used to work with a guy, who has since died, who went through life looking at the world as black or white, which was not good in general but also because one of his jobs was not full of certainty. The job, like life, was full of grey.

One of the best TV series ever created was Babylon 5. One of the races had rulers called the Grey Council. Their saying was,

They would meet in an empty room where there was only light in the middle of the space and surrounded by darkness. The Gray Council would stand in they area in between the light and darkness, the grey zone, thus their title and reality.

Maybe life is more quantum than we think.

Later,
Dan

I could not agree more with this.

It should be quite evident from my posts solving problems here that I don’t think in binary terms of black and white or 0 and 1 either. Politically or otherwise.

To solve a problem, you get the quantum foam bubbling, then collapse the wave function into an outcome. Without the quantum foam bubbling up all the possible solutions within the defined boundary of the problem/constraints, you won’t arrive at the best solution.

I can’t imagine going through life in a binary thought pattern.

I see it’s painful for some on here to follow my threads which are frothy with a “quantum foam” of ideas from everyone, but just look at the outcomes. Each thread collapsed onto a perfect solution, keeping in mind the boundary conditions of the problem.

The one that stands out the most to me is the cantilevered davits. That was a great thread and the result is holding my dinghy up beautifully without ever having to take the outboard off. They are actually so well designed that I don’t even get out of the dinghy. I lift my self up with the Outboard and the dinghy and lock up chain and all of the fuel and a bicycle and groceries. We all go up instead of me having to schlep things from dinghy over the transom. Everything I come back from shore with goes right up the davits and it is available to me from the deck level after I step off the dinghy directly onto the deck.


I’n my opinion, it’s a powerful way to solve problems. Massively paralleled, frothy, chaotic brainstorming, followed by a collapse of the intellectual wave function. Nothing beats it.

[Chris31415]

Originally Posted by Chotu

… They are not fixing all that is wrong with our flawed understanding of how things work. There has been relatively little progress on that for 100 years now.

Quantum mechanics isn’t the be all end all. It’s not the end of our understanding. It’s flawed. It’s incomplete. It’s incompatible. (with relativity) It needs work. There have been some attempts with string theory, etc, but it’s time for some new science.

Quantum Mechanics and the standard model have limitations and we hope they are incomplete. Flawed? This is too strong a term for me. These are the most rigorously tested and verified theories we have. Physicists would love to find results that disagree with them, but have so far been disappointed (LHC, maybe g-2 has found something but I’m not holding my breath).

As for incompatibility with GR, it may be GR that has issues. Who knows.

[Chotu]

Originally Posted by Chris31415

Quantum Mechanics and the standard model have limitations and we hope they are incomplete. Flawed? This is too strong a term for me. These are the most rigorously tested and verified theories we have. Physicists would love to find results that disagree with them, but have so far been disappointed (LHC, maybe g-2 has found something but I’m not holding my breath).

As for incompatibility with GR, it may be GR that has issues. Who knows.

I use strong terms all the time. Lol It’s just how I speak. Sorry about that.

But if you look up the definition of the word flaw and really focus on the actual definition, I think it is an appropriate use of the word. The quick definition on google it is damaged, blemish, or imperfect in some way. I would say quantum mechanics is certainly imperfect in some way.

It’s quite possible that general relativity has its own issues. I would bet on it. They both have problems. That’s why they’re both not quite right. I saw that little possibility at the large hadron collider. I thought I saw that it got ruled out after all. I don’t know. Only saw reference to it in passing.

All I’m saying is there is a lot of work to be done on the theoretical side.

It’s like we have a RIB with a single canoe paddle. It kind of works. It gets us there. But a set of oarlocks and oars would be a lot better.

PS: Where is Jim Cate? Would love to hear his opinions on this

[CaptTom]

You may notice that I prefaced my sentence on thinking in binary with "We're conditioned to think..."

I was not suggesting this is a good thing, or that we should be thinking this way.

I meant it more as a challenge. Something we should fight. I carefully chose the example of believing vs. disbelieving. I'm always being aske "Do you believe in...?" The expected answer is a firm "Yes" or "No." I resist that. Do you have evidence one way or the other? Can whatever you're asking me about be universally true or false, or can it change in different circumstances? I can almost always find that grey area. In other words, I don't accept the question as phrased.

Yes, the same can be extended to politics, but I didn't want to go there. I'll just say that there are plenty of people with strong binary opinions. Consensus or moderate candidates are scoffed at by both sides. Certainly it's worse in some places, at some times, than others. I won't opine as to where or when.

The point isn't to make it political. The point is to encourage people to explore the grey areas. It would seem we've made progress on that here. Now we just need to get the rest of the world on board!

[dannc]

Originally Posted by CaptTom

You may notice that I prefaced my sentence on thinking in binary with "We're conditioned to think..."

I was not suggesting this is a good thing, or that we should be thinking this way.
...

Yes, and I don't mean to suggest, and I don't think I did, that you think or do think, we should think in binary absolutes.

I just quoted your words because it allowed me to riff on the gray space between black and white which then allowed me to wrap the conversation back around quantumness. I think I just made up that word.

Another saying I use frequently is also from the Babylon 5 TV show and is about being between the tick and the tock.

"LORIEN
Between moments. When we are born, we are allocated a finite number of seconds. Each tick of the clock slices off a piece of us. Tick, a possibility for joy is gone; tock, a careless word ends one path, opens another. Tick, tock, tick, tock, always running out of time. Yours is almost used up. You're between seconds, lost in the infinite possibilities between tick and tock; tick, you're alive, tock... well, it was a good life, but a short one.

Later in the conversation, this is from a long conversation, but a deep, meaningful one, about life and the series. I cut out character names because one has to know the story line. Tis a shame that I cut out names, because they add more impact to these words but only if one knows the character and plot lines. Any who here are the quotes, and yes, I had to look them up since I don't have them memorized.

LORIEN
...
"Quantum physics tells us that time is primarily a matter of perception, that we actually exist simultaneously in the past, present and future."

"We all look to the future, trying to see the person we will one day become.

"We all look to the past, to the person who was and the decisions made that brought us to where we are today.
...

""The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us... and our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast terrible in-between.""

We all have moments of being in between the tick and tock, the 0 and 1, the black and white, the gray zone. Only when we decide, then we move from the gray zone to another state. And the process then repeats.

Later,
Dan

[CaptTom]

Well, this is getting deep.

So, if time is just a perception, then does the term "simultaneously" have any meaning?

To my admittedly meager understanding, it seems there is an "arrow of time." In other words, the future doesn't exist yet. It's not just out there, somewhere we can't quite reach.

It will be determined by the random vagaries of quantum particles, popping in and out of existence, moving between states and physical positions. Somehow from all that, there's an emergent property we call sentience, which allows us (at least to seem) to make decisions which influence that future. I'm not a fan of determinism. It just feels wrong. Or was I destined to feel that way?

[dannc]

Originally Posted by CaptTom

Well, this is getting deep.

So, if time is just a perception, then does the term "simultaneously" have any meaning?
...

Yep, it is getting deep and way beyond my pay grade! I am quoting a TV show after all, though, a well written one.

The TV show was written close to 30 years ago so maybe the understand of Quantum mechanics has changed.

Jim and Chotu can throw in their two cents.

Later,
Dan

[catsketcher]

I get the title about a Quantum researcher talking about weather, but I would rather an article written by an atmospheric scientist checking the ideas out. Of course quantum effects are not usually seen in our day to day world because it exists in the very small scale. I don't see what quantum physics would do to help understand weather unless it produces predictions. Otherwise it is like economics, which is around to make astrology look good and only used to predict past events. Chaos theory does help predictions and been around for decades, and one of the earliest researchers was Edward Lorenz, he started with weather.

It is a great story. He started modelling weather with 4 parameters on his trusty but slow computer (we are talking early 60s here). He would watch the values change in regard to each other - a feedback loop. One day he didn't bother inputting the whole number into the model to replay and modelling exercise, so he only put in the number to 4 decimal, but not 8 decimal places. Then when he re-ran the model it started the same way but then quickly totally diverged from the previous runs. He then knew that long range forecasting would never be accurate because of hyper sensitivity to intial conditions - the butterfly effect.

So rather than quantum physicists having to assist weather modellers, the weather guys actually helped spawn a much newer physics that has a lot of impact on our lives too. Sorry in some ways for the cynicism. I am a Science teacher and awful lot of baloney gets spread around the pseudioscience part of our world - eg the wellness world - that uses "quantum" in its title. Crystals the vibaret in tune or even focus your frequencies....Don't get me started in the idea of a "quantum leap". For the scientifically literate - a quantum leap is a step between two energy states. It is not a large amount of energy, but it is a discrete change from one state to another where an electron does not pass through the state in between. However it is often used as meaning a "huge amount". And it is really the smallest amount of energy possible. Tectonic shift is a better phrase for the same meaning, as there is LOTS of energy in an earthquake.

Rant over

Cheers

Phil

[Wotname]

Quantum mechanics or a binary model, I now understand the origins of the gender debate.

[CaptTom]

Originally Posted by Wotname

Quantum mechanics or a binary model, I now understand the origins of the gender debate.

I'm trying to see the analogy between gender and Schrödinger's cat. You don't know until you look in the...

Never mind. I'll let myself out.

[GordMay]

OCEAN CIRCULATION - CURRENTS:

Since the age of exploration, mariners have needed to know the speed and direction [velocity] of ocean currents, to steer their ships within harbors, and along trade and exploration routes.
A mariner needs to be able to measure the velocity of currents, by observing distance, time, and direction.

The simplest method of determining the velocity of a current, called “Lagrangian measurements”, involves an observer, a floating object [drifter], and a timing device. The observer divides the distance the object traveled, by the time it took the object to travel that distance, which equals the speed of the current. By combining the speed of the object, with the direction in which it moved, the observer can then determine the current’s velocity.
Current velocities can also be measured using “Eulerian measurements”, in which the speed and direction of the fluid [fluid flow] is measured, at one point only. In this method, an instrument is anchored in the ocean, at a given location, and the water movement is measured, as it flows past the instrument.

Waves:

Coastal currents are intricately tied to winds, waves, and land formations. Winds that blow along the shoreline [longshore winds] affect waves and, therefore, currents.

Before one can understand any type of surface current, one must understand how wind and waves operate. Wave height is affected by wind speed, wind duration, and fetch.
If wind speed is slow, only small waves result, regardless of wind duration or fetch.
If the wind speed is great, but it only blows for a few minutes, no large waves will result, even if the wind speed is strong, and fetch is unlimited. Also, if strong winds blow for a long period of time, but over a short fetch, no large waves form. Large waves occur only when all three factors combine.

As wind-driven waves approach the shore, friction between the sea floor and the water causes the water to form increasingly steep angles. Waves that become too steep, and unstable, are termed “breakers” or “breaking waves.”



Currents:

When used in association with water, the term "current" describes the motion of the water. Some familiar currents are: the motion of rainwater, as it flows down the street, or the motion of the water in a creek, stream, or river, flowing from higher elevation to lower elevation. This motion is caused by gravity. The speed and direction (velocity) of currents can be measured and recorded. [see' Lagrangian' or 'Eulerian' measurements, above

Oceanic currents are driven by several factors: tides, winds, and differences in water density.

One is the rise and fall of the tides, which is driven by the gravitational attraction, of the sun and moon, on Earth's oceans. Tides create a current in the oceans, near the shore, and in bays and estuaries, along the coast. These are called "tidal currents." Tidal currents are the only type of currents that change in a very regular pattern, and can be predicted for future dates.

A second factor that drives ocean currents is wind. Winds drive currents that are at or near the ocean's surface. These currents are generally measured in meters per second or in knots (1 knot = 1.15 miles per hour or 1.85 kilometers per hour). Winds drive currents near coastal areas on a localized scale, and in the open ocean on a global scale.

A third factor that drives currents is thermohaline circulation - a process driven by density differences in water due to temperature (thermo) and salinity (haline) in different parts of the ocean. Currents driven by thermohaline circulation occur at both deep and shallow ocean levels and move much slower than tidal or surface currents.



Longshore Currents:

Longshore currents are generated when a "train" of waves reach the coastline and release bursts of energy.

The speed at which waves approach the shore depends on sea floor and shoreline features and the depth of the water. As a wave moves toward the beach, different segments of the wave encounter the beach before others, which slows these segments down. As a result, the wave tends to bend and conform to the general shape of the coastline. Also, waves do not typically reach the beach perfectly parallel to the shoreline. Rather, they arrive at a slight angle, called the “angle of wave approach.”

When a wave reaches a beach or coastline, it releases a burst of energy that generates a current, which runs parallel to the shoreline. This type of current is called a “longshore current.”



Upwelling:

Winds blowing across the ocean surface often push water away from an area. When this occurs, water rises up from beneath the surface, to replace the diverging surface water. This process is known as upwelling.

Upwelling occurs in the open ocean and along coastlines. The reverse process, called downwelling, also occurs when wind causes surface water to build up along a coastline. The surface water eventually sinks toward the bottom.

Subsurface water that rises to the surface as a result of upwelling is typically colder, rich in nutrients, and biologically productive. Therefore, good fishing grounds typically are found where upwelling is common. For example, the rich fishing grounds along the west coasts of Africa and South America are supported by year-round coastal upwelling.

Seasonal upwelling and downwelling also occur along the West Coast of the United States. In winter, winds blow from the south to the north, resulting in downwelling. During the summer, winds blow from the north to the south, and water moves offshore, resulting in upwelling along the coast. This summer upwelling produces cold coastal waters in the San Francisco area, contributing to the frequent summer fogs.



Coriolis force and the Ekman spiral:

To understand the effects of winds on ocean currents, one first needs to understand the Coriolis force, and the Ekman spiral.

If the Earth did not rotate and remained stationary, the atmosphere would circulate between the poles (high pressure areas), and the equator (a low pressure area), in a simple back-and-forth pattern.
But because the Earth rotates, circulating air is deflected. Instead of circulating in a straight pattern, the air deflects toward the right, in the Northern Hemisphere, and toward the left in the Southern Hemisphere, resulting in curved paths. This deflection is called the Coriolis effect.

The Ekman spiral is a consequence of the Coriolis effect.
When surface water molecules move by the force of the wind, they, in turn, drag deeper layers of water molecules below them. Each layer of water molecules is moved, by friction, from the shallower layer, and each deeper layer moves more slowly, than the layer above it, until the movement ceases at a depth of about 100 meters [330 feet].
Like the surface water, however, the deeper water is deflected by the Coriolis effect: to the right in the Northern Hemisphere, and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere.
As a result, each successively deeper layer of water moves more slowly, to the right or left, creating a spiral effect. Because the deeper layers of water move more slowly than the shallower layers, they tend to twist around, and flow opposite to the surface current.



Surface Ocean Currents:

Atmospheric circulation, and the Coriolis effect, create global wind patterns, including the trade winds and westerlies.

In the Northern Hemisphere, warm air around the equator rises and flows north toward the pole. As the air moves away from the equator, the Coriolis effect deflects it toward the right. It cools and descends near 30 degrees North latitude. The descending air blows from the northeast to the southwest, back toward the equator.
A similar wind pattern occurs in the Southern Hemisphere; these winds blow from the southeast toward the northwest and descend near 30 degrees South latitude.

These prevailing winds, known as the trade winds, meet at the Intertropical Convergence Zone [AKA: doldrums], between 5 degrees North and 5 degrees South latitude, where the winds are calm. The remaining air, that does not descend at 30 degrees North or South latitude, continues toward the poles, and is known as the westerly winds, or westerlies. The trade winds are so named because ships have historically taken advantage of them, to aid their journeys, between Europe and the Americas



Boundary Currents:

Global winds drag on the water’s surface, causing it to move, and build up, in the direction that the wind is blowing.
And, just as the Coriolis effect deflects winds to the right in the Northern Hemisphere, and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere, it also results in the deflection of major surface ocean currents, to the right in the Northern Hemisphere [a clockwise spiral], and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere [a counter-clockwise spiral].
These major spirals, of ocean-circling currents, are called “gyres”, and occur north and south of the equator. They do not occur at the equator, where the Coriolis effect is not present .



Thermocline Circulation:

Winds drive ocean currents, in the upper 100 meters of the ocean’s surface. However, ocean currents also flow thousands of meters below the surface. These deep-ocean currents are driven by differences in the water’s density, which is controlled by temperature [thermo] and salinity [haline]. This process is known as thermohaline circulation.

In the Earth's polar regions, ocean water gets very cold, forming sea ice. As a consequence the surrounding seawater gets saltier, because when sea ice forms, the salt is left behind. As the seawater gets saltier, its density increases, and it starts to sink. Surface water is pulled in, to replace the sinking water, which in turn, eventually, becomes cold and salty enough to sink. This initiates the deep-ocean currents, driving the global conveyer belt.



The Global Conveyor Belt:

There are 5 major ocean gyres [the North Atlantic, the South Atlantic, the Indian, the North Pacific, and the South Pacific]. One in the middle of each of the oceans. Formed by surface winds, and the Coriolis effect.

Thermohaline circulation drives a global-scale system of currents [gyres] called the “global conveyor belt.” The conveyor belt begins on the surface of the ocean near the pole in the North Atlantic. Here, the water is chilled by arctic temperatures. It also gets saltier because when sea ice forms, the salt does not freeze and is left behind in the surrounding water. The cold water is now more dense, due to the added salts, and sinks toward the ocean bottom. Surface water moves in to replace the sinking water, thus creating a current.

This deep water moves south, between the continents, past the equator, and down to the ends of Africa and South America. The current travels around the edge of Antarctica, where the water cools and sinks again, as it does in the North Atlantic. Thus, the conveyor belt gets "recharged." As it moves around Antarctica, two sections split off the conveyor and turn northward. One section moves into the Indian Ocean, the other into the Pacific Ocean.

These two sections that split off warm up and become less dense as they travel northward toward the equator, so that they rise to the surface (upwelling). They then loop back southward and westward to the South Atlantic, eventually returning to the North Atlantic, where the cycle begins again.

The conveyor belt moves at much slower speeds (a few centimeters per second) than wind-driven or tidal currents (tens to hundreds of centimeters per second). It is estimated that any given cubic meter of water takes about 1,000 years to complete the journey along the global conveyor belt. In addition, the conveyor moves an immense volume of water—more than 100 times the flow of the Amazon River.

The conveyor belt is also a vital component of the global ocean nutrient and carbon dioxide cycles. Warm surface waters are depleted of nutrients and carbon dioxide, but they are enriched again as they travel through the conveyor belt as deep or bottom layers. The base of the world’s food chain depends on the cool, nutrient-rich waters that support the growth of algae and seaweed.

The global conveyor belt is a strong, but easily disrupted process. Research suggests that the conveyor belt may be affected by climate change.
If global warming results in increased rainfall in the North Atlantic, and makes the Southern Hemisphere drier, and the melting of glaciers and sea ice, the influx of warm freshwater onto the sea surface could block the formation of sea ice, disrupting the sinking of cold, salty water. This sequence of events could slow or even stop the conveyor belt, which could result in potentially drastic temperature changes in Europe, and worldwide.

[SailOar]

Perhaps this is a blend of atmospheric physics and chemistry.

Rising methane could be a sign that Earth’s climate is part-way through a ‘termination-level transition’

Since 2006, the amount of heat-trapping methane in Earth’s atmosphere has been rising fast and, unlike the rise in carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane’s recent increase seems to be driven by biological emissions, not the burning of fossil fuels. This might just be ordinary variability – a result of natural climate cycles such as El Niño. Or it may signal that a great transition in Earth’s climate has begun....


Methane in the air rose rapidly from 2006 – then it rose again, and again. NOAA/Nisbet et al. (2023), Author provided

Today’s growth seems to be driven by new emissions from wetlands, especially near the equator but perhaps also from Canada (beavers are methane factories which pull huge amounts of plant matter into ponds they’ve made) and Siberia. This is a result of climate change: increasing rainfall has made wetlands wetter and bigger while rising temperatures have boosted plant growth, providing more decomposing matter and so more methane. Emissions from huge cattle lots in tropical Africa, India and Brazil may also be rising and rotting waste in landfills near megacities like Delhi are important sources too.....

Full terminations take several thousands of years to complete, but many include a creeping onset of warming, then a very abrupt phase of extremely rapid climate change that can take a century or less, followed by a longer, slower period during which the great ice caps finally melt. In the abrupt phase of the great change that brought about the modern climate, Greenland’s temperature rose by around 10°C within a few decades. During these abrupt phases, methane climbs very steeply indeed....

[GordMay]

Overview of the main open-ocean currents.
Red arrows represent warm water moving toward colder regions.
Blue arrows represent cold water moving toward warmer regions.
Black arrows represent currents that don’t involve significant temperature
changes.





The thermohaline circulation system, also known as the Global Ocean Conveyor.





The prevailing wind patterns of Earth.





Major global climatic regions, in relation to atmospheric convection cells.

Rising air and low pressure creates rain and wet environments, at 0 degree and 60 deg latitudes, while high pressure, sinking air creates drier conditions at 30 deg and 90 deg latitudes.

[GordMay]

3D map, showing Hadley cells, in relationship to Trade Winds, on the surface.