Dear John and Paul,
I have interspersed two thoughts.
On 2010/06/11, at 02:23 , John M. Steele wrote:
I can envision 1 L or a few, I can't envision 3 million. Would not
3000 m³ be a lot better than throwing in "big counting words" in
lieu of a suitable unit or prefix?
One problem with this is that we tend to avoid using prefixes with SI
units like cubic metres; megasquaremetres doesn't work linguistically.
An alternative we use widely in Australia is to add prefixes to the SI
unit litre.
I will probably take flack for this one, but SAE metric practice
is to use the cubic dekameter for large amounts of water, such as
irrigation, where traditional measure would be the acre-foot. In
that notation, the leak would be 3 dam³/day.
Irrigation water in Australia is measured in litres. To avoid the
issues of false precision and uncomfortable prefix use (such as
megacubicdecametres) our practice here is to use litres for kitchen
use, kilolitres for household rainwater tanks, megalitres for farm
irrigation or small dam storage, and gigalitres for large dam storage
amounts. Our water supply for Geelong has a capacity of 21 504
megalitres and it currently (after 12 years of drought) contains 4724
megalitres.
If as Paul reports (below) a figure for the oil Gulf oil flow is '3
million litres per day' we would more likely use '3 megalitres per
day' in Australia.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
Author of the ebook, Metrication Leaders Guide, see
http://metricationmatters.com/MetricationLeadersGuideInfo.html
Hear Pat speak at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lshRAPvPZY
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
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Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
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From: Paul Armstrong <[email protected]>
To: U.S. Metric Association <[email protected]>
Sent: Thu, June 10, 2010 11:48:40 AM
Subject: [USMA:47645] Re: Oil Spill Technical Team Using SI
At 2010-06-09T14:20-0500, [email protected] wrote:
> I *heard* on a news network that the Technical Team assigned to
> measure the flow rate of crude oil and gas leaking from the floor of
> the Gulf of Mexico is measuring depth in meters, *independent* of BP
> statements.
>
> What unit of flow rate is being used by the Team? I would like to
> hear the rate in kg/s for each major hydrocarbon component of the
> liquid and gas leakage.
>
> Neither "barrels per day" nor "gallons per day" is acceptable.
The last time I heard a story about it was a BBC world service podcast
where "3 million liters per day" was used.
Paul
