Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with atmosphere

Weird noctilucent clouds over Philly

drinkcoffee — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:46:00 -0800

Anyone else in the Philadelphia area seeing this? There are some strange, vertical clouds in the area that look a lot like aurorae (it's well into darkness here), but they aren't moving. They look like they might be high-altitude noctilucent clouds, but I think it's the wrong time of year for those. What are they? I've never seen anything like them.

Nukes… in… space…

Artw — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:25:33 -0800

To what extent would the lack of an atmosphere reduce the effectiveness of nuclear weapons?

You don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows

conch soup — Wed, 09 May 2007 23:50:14 -0800

Does the atmosphere rotate? In other words, is there a net shift in air around the globe, east to west? I got totally dumbfounded in a discussion about this, and Google didn't seem to help. Does the atmosphere have a net- rather than localized- rotation around the globe, or are all the east winds basically equivalent to the west winds? Do the Easterlies and Westerlies (http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/guides/mtr/hurr/gifs/mvmt1.gif) cancel out?
Example: In the midwest US, it would seem that the whole atmosphere has a general shift from West to East. But in the Caribbean it seems to go, on average, East to West. Does this all even out in the end, or is there a net rotation in relation to the terra firma?

way better than sky-diving

clockzero — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 18:53:49 -0800

How could someone avoid burning up in the atmosphere while falling to Earth from orbit? Assuming they were not in a space shuttle. With the right sort of space-suit? Diving skills, aerodynamism? Is it possible?

Thicker air and lower gravity

Ritchie — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 03:35:06 -0800

Imagine a world in which the atmospheric density is somewhat greater than ours, but gravity is somewhat lower. How might our experience be different on that world? For example, I imagine that the greater air resistance would mean a lower terminal velocity for falling objects. Is this correct or am I confused?

Assuming a mix of gasses in the same proportion to our own atmosphere, would the higher pressure of oxygen at sea level cause physiological problems, or would the higher pressure of nitrogen force you to decompress gradually if you, say, went up in a balloon, or risk an attack of the bends? What other physiological effects might occur?

How would gunfire, explosives and other incendiary reactions be affected?

How would climate and weather differ? Would clouds form more readily? Would they form at higher or lower altitudes?

What sort of technologies might be favored?

What other interesting effects might this environment have?

A world with lower-than-Earth gravity probably can't retain a denser-than-Earth atmosphere, I realize. Be gentle in the face of my naivety.

Music to tie for.

brautigan — Thu, 11 May 2006 07:31:41 -0800

Music for bondage. My partner and I are spending a long night in a rather old, expensive and very opulant hotel next weekend. Think four posters, venetian glass, tactile velvets, silk brocades, hand-printed wallpapers etc. OTT grand. While there we'll be indulging our kink for ropes and knots.

It turns out there is a nice Bose soundsystem in our room and I'd like to put together a little background music to cover the noise we'll be making ourselves.

So, music to tie one's lover up to? What would the Marquis listen to? Classical, baroque?? Or should we just drop in a Merzbow cd and really torture ourselves?

unexplained pressure differential

Galvatron — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 22:48:46 -0800

My old apartment had extremely leaky single-pane windows, so in the winter my roommate and I would always cover them with tightly sealed heat-shrink plastic film. Why would the plastic nearly always be bulging inward? My intuition tells me that the plastic should sometimes bulge inward and sometimes outward, as atmospheric pressure fluctuates. I didn't ever notice the plastic flexing significantly towards the outside. Also, I might have expected the plastic to bulge outward when the winds picked up, due to Bernoulli's principle--didn't happen. What's the deal? Why was my apartment constantly behaving like a low pressure zone?

If it makes any difference, the apartment was on the lower level of a two-story building, with the windows at ground level.

The sunsets were purple and red and yellow and on fire, and the clouds would catch the colors everywhere

Rothko — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 16:44:57 -0800

What makes clouds form where they form, and how? I don't fly often. Flying up to and down from cruising altitude a few times over the last week, I noticed that clouds seemed to form in certain shapes at certain layers. Those layers seemed well defined at specific altitudes — like a blanket of clouds at, say, 12000 ft, and another layer at 24000 ft. What causes certain shapes at certain altitudes, and "clustering" at specific elevations? Or are my observations completely off the mark?

Tubes? In spaaaaaace?

punkbitch — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 17:29:29 -0800

What would happen if someone were to build a tunnel or tube into space? (Description inside...) What I'm imagining is a collapsible tube made out of an ultra-strong material that a rocket would "erect into space." Huh? Well, what if a rocket, attached to this tube material (which could collapse onto itself like those collapsable cups) blasted off into space.

Basically . . . if there were a tube that connected the ground with outerspace . . .what properties would it exhibit? Would the atmosphere remain the same inside the tube as it is outside? Would this create a vacuum? Could we throw our garbage into orbit . . .or better . . . out of orbit? Thanks Mefites!

Space, the final frontier of smells!

stonerose — Wed, 28 Jan 2004 19:26:02 -0800

The smell of space. How and why? [much more... out there.] In this thread on the demise of Columbia, mrmcsurly pointed to a William Langwiesche article which said "The smell inside the shuttle is distinctly metallic, unless someone has just come in from a spacewalk, after which the quarters are permeated for a while with 'the smell of space,' a pungent burned odor that some compare to that of seared meat, and that Bloomfield describes as closer to the smell of a torch on steel." I've been haunted by that idea since reading about it.

Some googling has revealed many descriptions, few explanations, and no clear consensus: We call it "the smell of space." But to me it's like an ozone smell — if you ever smelled ozone as a result of a [electric] shock or static electricity or whatever. I think it's probably a result of the atomic oxygen that's prevalent at that altitude. We don't have much of an atmosphere up there — a few molecules floating around — and I think that what we smell when objects come back in. It happens whether it be a spacecraft that's just docked and you open that hatch, or someone who's been on an EVA for a while and brings the suit back inside.

"It still reminds me of sweet welding fumes," he said. "And it may not actually be the smell of space. It may be off-gassing from the space station structure. But I take enough poetic license to label it as the smell of space."

Actually anytime there's metal that's exposed to space, it takes on kind of a unique [smell]. I would call it an ozone smell.

It was as if someone was welding down the corridor. You know why? The airlock metal's oxide coating had evaporated into space, leaving this really fresh layer of metal."

At the risk of killing the romance... what would various sorts of space 'smell' like, once brought inside, and why? what are shuttle/Mir/ISS astronauts really smelling?