Hi, Over the years, a few of you have pointed out that I tend to be an Apollionian scientist celebrating order as opposed to a Dionysian one cele brating chaos. This trait is no more clearly demonstrated than in my systematic argument for how a convective column is created that connects a warm surface with the jet stream level of the troposphere. I was talking with Stephen this morning about theta and in about 30 seconds he had ginned up a model of a lateral wind blowing over a raised hot continent. What was mind blowing to me is how plumes of high theta were just randomly thrust up to high levels of the atmosphere by turbulence. No complex structured argument required. I cant say I understand what else the model is doing, but this was definitely a poke in the eye of my Apollonian rationalism. See:
https://harvardviz.live/models/theta-windover-hot-land.html Press the theta key which is marked by a tiny little greek letter. The wonderful thing about these models is they so rapidly beg for enhancements. In the first place, anything to the left or right of the plateau is not hot. In the real situation the water on either side of the continent is much cooler than the continent. I should think that putting the temperature boundary at the boundary of the continent would vastly increase turbulence. Second,the model seems to imply an unstable flow with cooler thetas above, which is thermodynamically impossible. The actual transverse flow arrives already structured with a steady increase of theta with altitude. Any thoughts, anyone? These visualizations are flat-out inspiring. Nick -- Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology Clark University [email protected] https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson https://substack.com/@monist
.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
