In my view, Stan, one of the biggest "selling points" of the SI is the
ease of moving up or down the scale via the prefixes. You comment that
you don't consider the use of hectopascals as being very public
friendly. Another way to view this is that it's easier to make the
transition in the public's mind from millibars to hectopascals than it
is to kilopascals. (Same number, no decimal point shift, different unit
name.) From that standpoint, I would consider it public friendly and I
appreciate how easy it would make public metrication. The National
Hurricane Center's reports on eye pressures are all in millibars and I
live for the day when they will start saying hectopascals instead. As
you might guess, hurricanes are of great interest here in SC for about
half the year.
Once we get the public metricated and they get a little practice under
their belts in moving up and down the scale (back and forth between
millimeters and centimeters, milliliters and deciliters, etc.) then the
last step to kilopascals, if that is indeed desired, should be a piece
of cake. I happen to like hectopascals because one can avoid using a
decimal point in reporting barometric pressures to the most commonly
used precision.
Jim
On Saturday 14 April 2001 1521, G. Stanley Doore wrote:
> I am looking for many examples of applications which now use the
> Pascal for pressure in SI units (multiples of 1000) such as Pa
> (Pascal), kPa (kilopascals), MPa (megapascals) etc. Weather uses
> hPa (hectopascals) or millibars which is not very public friendly.
> I'd like to see weather reported in kPa to be consistent with other
> applications and the rest of the world. Your comments would be
> appreciated.
