scholarly journals Every Snowflake is Not Unique

2015 ◽  
Vol 137 (01) ◽  
pp. 40-41
Author(s):  
Adrian Bejan

This article discusses various aspects of snowflake architectures. It is certain that every snowflake conforms to only one architecture: a flat star with six fishbones connected at the center. The latent heat of solidification, which is released by the water vapor that becomes solid at the bead surface. There comes a critical time when the spherical bead is no longer an efficient architecture for dissipating heat. The principle calls for design change, toward faster heat release and solidification. The growth of ice morphs abruptly into a ball continued in one plane by needles. Because of the configuration of the water molecule, the needles grow in six directions. The flat star transfers heat to the surroundings more easily than a spherical bead with the same diameter. In order to give credit to the view that every snowflake is unique, the actual configuration depends on many secondary effects, which are of random origin.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-52
Author(s):  
Gregory Tierney ◽  
Walter A. Robinson ◽  
Gary Lackmann ◽  
Rebecca Miller

AbstractHigh-impact events such as heat waves and droughts are often associated with persistent positive geopotential height anomalies (PAs). Understanding how PA activity will change in a future warmer climate is therefore fundamental to projecting associated changes in weather and climate extremes. This is a complex problem because the dynamics of PAs and their associated blocking activity are still poorly understood. Furthermore, climate-change influences on PA activity may be geographically dependent and encompass competing influences. To expose the salient impacts of climate change, we use an oceanic channel configuration of the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) in a bivariate experiment focused on changes in environmental temperature, moisture, and baroclinicity. The 500-hPa wind speed and flow variability are found to increase with increasing temperature and baroclinicity, driven by increases in latent heat release and a stronger virtual temperature gradient. Changes to 500-hPa sinuosity are negligible. PAs are objectively identified at the 500-hPa level using an anomaly threshold method. When using a fixed threshold, PA trends indicate increased activity and strength with warming, but decreased activity and strength with Arctic amplification. Use of a climate-relative threshold hides these trends and highlights the importance of accurate characterization of the mean flow. Changes in PA activity mirror corresponding changes in 500-hPa flow variability and are found to be attributable to changes in three distinct dynamical mechanisms: baroclinic wave activity, virtual temperature effects, and latent heat release.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Behrendt ◽  
Florian Spaeth ◽  
Volker Wulfmeyer

<p>We will present recent measurements made with the water vapor differential absorption lidar (DIAL) of University of Hohenheim (UHOH). This scanning system has been developed in recent years for the investigation of atmospheric turbulence and land-atmosphere feedback processes.</p><p>The lidar is housed in a mobile trailer and participated in recent years in a number of national and international field campaigns. We will present examples of vertical pointing and scanning measurements, especially close to the canopy. The water vapor gradients in the surface layer are related to the latent heat flux. Thus, with such low-elevation scans, the latent heat flux distribution over different surface characteristics can be monitored, which is important to verify and improve both numerical weather forecast models and climate models.</p><p>The transmitter of the UHOH DIAL consists of a diode-pumped Nd:YAG laser which pumps a Ti:sapphire laser. The output power of this laser is up to 10 W. Two injection seeders are used to switch pulse-to-pulse between the online and offline signals. These signals are then either directly sent into the atmosphere or coupled into a fiber and guided to a transmitting telescope which is attached to the scanner unit. The receiving telescope has a primary mirror with a dimeter of 80 cm. The backscatter signals are recorded shot to shot and are typically averaged over 0.1 to 1 s.</p>


Author(s):  
A. M. Savchenko ◽  
Yu. V. Konovalov ◽  
A. V. Laushkin

The purpose of this work is to show that during mixing, two hidden (latent) processes proceed simultaneously and compensate each other: the first initiates an increase in the average heat capacity, equal in magnitude to the entropy of mixing, which requires energy absorption to ensure a constant temperature, the second initiates simultaneous latent heat release by strengthening interatomic bonds. The passage of these two processes during mixing shows the identity of the vibrational and configurational (statistical) entropy.


2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramachandra V. Devireddy ◽  
John C. Bischof ◽  
Perry H. Leo ◽  
John S. Lowengrub

Abstract The latent heat of fusion, ΔHf of a cryobiological medium (a solute laden aqueous solution) is a crucial parameter in the cryopreservation process. The latent heat has often been approximated by that of pure water (∼ 335 mJ/mg). However, recent calorimetric (DSC - Pyris 1) measurements suggest that the actual magnitude of latent heat of fusion during freezing of solute laden aqueous systems is far less. Fourteen different pre-nucleated solute laden aqueous systems (NaCl-H2O, Phosphate Buffered Saline or PBS, serum free RPMI, cell culture medium, glycerol and Anti Freeze Protein solutions) were found to have significantly lower ΔHf than that of pure water (Devireddy and Bischof, 1998). In the present study additional calorimetric experiments are performed at 1, 5 and 20 °C/min in five representative cryobiological media (isotonic or 1× NaCl-H2O, 10× NaCl-H2O, 1× PBS, 5× PBS and 10× PBS) to determine the kinetics of ice crystallization. The temperature (T) and time (t) dependence of the latent heat release is measured. The experimental data shows that at a fixed temperature, the fraction of heat released at higher cooling rates (5 and 20 °C/min) is lower than at 1 °C/min for all the solutions studied. We then sought a simple model that could predict the experimentally measured behavior and examined the full set of heat and mass transport equations during the freezing process in a DSC sample pan. The model neglects the interaction between the growing ice crystals and is most appropriate during the early stages of the freezing process. An examination of the coefficients in the heat and mass transport equations shows that heat transport occurs much more rapidly than solute transport. Hence, the full model reduces to one in which the temperature profile is constant in space while the solute concentration profile obeys the full time and space dependent diffusion equation. The model reveals the important physical parameters controlling the mass transport at the freezing interface and further elucidates the experimental results, i.e. the temperature and time dependence of the latent heat release.


2019 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 1081-1100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil P. Lareau

Abstract Doppler and Raman lidar observations of vertical velocity and water vapor mixing ratio are used to probe the physics and statistics of subcloud and cloud-base latent heat fluxes during cumulus convection at the ARM Southern Great Plains (SGP) site in Oklahoma, United States. The statistical results show that latent heat fluxes increase with height from the surface up to ~0.8Zi (where Zi is the convective boundary layer depth) and then decrease to ~0 at Zi. Peak fluxes aloft exceeding 500 W m−2 are associated with periods of increased cumulus cloud cover and stronger jumps in the mean humidity profile. These entrainment fluxes are much larger than the surface fluxes, indicating substantial drying over the 0–0.8Zi layer accompanied by moistening aloft as the CBL deepens over the diurnal cycle. We also show that the boundary layer humidity budget is approximately closed by computing the flux divergence across the 0–0.8Zi layer. Composite subcloud velocity and water vapor anomalies show that clouds are linked to coherent updraft and moisture plumes. The moisture anomaly is Gaussian, most pronounced above 0.8Zi and systematically wider than the velocity anomaly, which has a narrow central updraft flanked by downdrafts. This size and shape disparity results in downdrafts characterized by a high water vapor mixing ratio and thus a broad joint probability density function (JPDF) of velocity and mixing ratio in the upper CBL. We also show that cloud-base latent heat fluxes can be both positive and negative and that the instantaneous positive fluxes can be very large (~10 000 W m−2). However, since cloud fraction tends to be small, the net impact of these fluxes remains modest.


2012 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 1405-1426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julien Lambaerts ◽  
Guillaume Lapeyre ◽  
Vladimir Zeitlin

Abstract The authors undertake a detailed analysis of the influence of water vapor condensation and latent heat release upon the evolution of the baroclinic instability. The framework consists in a two-layer rotating shallow-water model with moisture coupled to dynamics through mass exchange between the layers due to condensation/precipitation. The model gives all known in literature models of this kind as specific limits. It is fully nonlinear and ageostrophic. The reference state is a baroclinic Bickley jet. The authors first study its “dry” linear instability and then use the most unstable mode to initialize high-resolution numerical simulations of the life cycle of the instability in nonprecipitating (moisture being a passive tracer) and precipitating cases. A new-generation well-balanced finite-volume scheme is used in these simulations. The evolution in the nonprecipitating case follows the standard cyclonic wave-breaking life cycle of the baroclinic instability, which is reproduced with a high fidelity. In the precipitating case, the onset of condensation significantly increases the growth rate of the baroclinic instability at the initial stages due to production of available potential energy by the latent heat release. Condensation occurs in frontal regions and wraps up around the cyclone, which is consistent with the moist cyclogenesis theory and observations. Condensation induces a clear-cut cyclone–anticyclone asymmetry. The authors explain the underlying mechanism and show how it modifies the equilibration of the flow at the late stages of the saturation of the instability. In spite of significant differences in the evolution, only weak differences in various norms of the perturbations remain between precipitating and nonprecipitating cases at the end of the saturation process.


2012 ◽  
Vol 69 (5) ◽  
pp. 1617-1632 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno Deremble ◽  
Guillaume Lapeyre ◽  
Michael Ghil

Abstract To understand the atmospheric response to a midlatitude oceanic front, this paper uses a quasigeostrophic (QG) model with moist processes. A well-known, three-level QG model on the sphere has been modified to include such processes in an aquaplanet setting. Its response is analyzed in terms of the upper-level atmospheric jet for sea surface temperature (SST) fronts of different profiles and located at different latitudes. When the SST front is sufficiently strong, it tends to anchor the mean atmospheric jet, suggesting that the jet’s spatial location and pattern are mainly affected by the latitude of the SST front. Changes in the jet’s pattern are studied, focusing on surface sensible heat flux and on moisture effects through latent heat release. It is found that latent heat release due to moist processes is modified when the SST front is changed, and this is responsible for the meridional displacement of the jet. Moreover, both latent heat release and surface sensible heat flux contribute to the jet’s strengthening. These results highlight the role of SST fronts and moist processes in affecting the characteristics of the midlatitude jet stream and of its associated storm track, particularly their positions.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document