ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES
340: INTRODUCTION TO THERMODYNAMICS AND CLOUD PROCESSES
WINTER
QUARTER 2006
GENERAL INFORMATION
Instructor: Professor
Mark T. Stoelinga
Room
508 ATG
Telephone:
206-543-6235
Office
Hours: Tuesday
and Thursday 10:30 am – Noon
Class
Meets: M,
Tu, W, Th, F, 9:30
– 10:20 am
Place: Room
ATG 310C
Required
Book: Atmospheric
Sciences: An Introductory Survey, Second Edition by J. M. Wallace and P. V. Hobbs. Academic Press, 2006.
This textbook should be available in the University Bookstore by 1
February 2006. Until that time,
you can obtain a PDF file of Chapter 3 at:
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~stoeling/WH-Ch03.pdf
Purpose
of Course: 1) To review the basic concepts of
thermodynamics and to
apply
these to the atmosphere.
2) To provide an introduction to the
physical processes
leading
to the formation of clouds, precipitation, and
storm
electrification.
Grading: 1) 2/9 (22.2%) of the grade is
homework/quizzes.
During the course
a number of problems will be assigned.
You will be expected to work on these problems as homework. However, you will not hand them in.
Instead, students will be called on at random to work through the
solution on the board during verbal quiz periods that are held every
Friday. This is a low-pressure
environment with class participation encouraged. While your grade will not hinge on getting the problem
exactly right at the board, everyone (including students at the board and those
in the “audience”) will be graded on their grasp of course concepts; on evidence
that they have made a serious attempt to think about and solve the problems ahead
of time; and on their ability to show and explain what they are doing and why
they are doing it.
2) 3/9 (33.3%) of the grade is the mid-term
exam, held on 3 February.
The
mid-term is closed-book, with basic formulas given.
3) 4/9 (44.4%) of the grade is the final
exam, held at 8:30-10:20 am
on Wednesday, 15 March 2006, in Room ATG 310C. Final exam is
closed-book,
with basic formulas given.
Instruction Ends: Friday, 10 March 2006
SYLLABUS
——— Week 1 ———————————————————————————————
2 January UW HOLIDAY: New Year’s Day observed (no class)
3 January Lec. 1: Course Information. Introduction to course. Boyle’s and Charles’s Laws.
4 January Lec. 2: Ideal gas scale of temperature. Ideal gas equation. Molecular weight.
5 January Lec. 3: First Law. Work performed by a gas. Sources of heat. Joule’s Law.
6 January Lec. 4: Heat capacity. Equipartition of energy. Enthalpy.
——— Week 2 ———————————————————————————————
9 January Lec. 5: Pressure-volume diagram for an ideal gas. Isothermal and adiabatic processes.
10 January Lec. 6: Cyclic and reversible processes. Heat engines. Efficiency. Carnot’s ideal heat engine.
11 January Lec. 7: Second Law and Carnot’s theorems.
12 January Lec. 8: Kelvin’s absolute scale of temperature. Relationship between the ideal-gas scale and the absolute scale of temperature.
13 January Quiz
——— Week 3 ———————————————————————————————
16 January UW HOLIDAY: Martin Luther King Day observed (no class)
17 January Lec. 9: Efficiency of an ideal heat engine. Entropy.
18 January Lec. 10: Carnot cycle on a temperature-entropy diagram.
19 January Lec. 11: Clausius-Clapeyron equation. Dalton’s Law.
20 January Quiz
——— Week 4 ———————————————————————————————
23 January Lec. 12: Free energies.
24 January Lec. 13: Composition of dry air. Apparent molecular weight. Ideal gas equation for dry air.
25 January Lec. 14: Hydrostatic equation. Geopotential. Geopotential height. Scale height. Hypsometric equation.
26 January Lec. 15: Thickness. Reduction of pressure to sea level. Altimeters.
27 January Quiz
——— Week 5 ———————————————————————————————
30 January Lec. 16: Concept of an air parcel. First Law for a dry air parcel. Dry static energy. Dry adiabatic lapse rate.
31 January Lec. 17: Static stability for dry air parcel displacements. Inversions. Gravity waves.
1 February Lec. 18: Potential temperature.
2 February Lec. 19: Meteorological thermodynamic diagrams.
3 February MID-TERM EXAM
——— Week 6 ———————————————————————————————
6 February Lec. 20: Mirages.
7 February Lec. 21: Moisture in the air. Ideal gas equation for pure water vapor and for moist air. Hypsometric equation for moist air. Virtual temperature.
8 February Lec. 22: Saturated air. Saturation vapor pressure. Saturation mixing ratio. Relative humidity. Dewpoint. Lifted condensation level.
9 February Lec. 23: Moist adiabatic processes. Saturated adiabatic vs. pseudoadiabatic processes. Latent heat and the First Law for saturated parcel displacements. The moist adiabatic lapse rate.
10 February Quiz
——— Week 7 ———————————————————————————————
13 February Lec. 24: Adiabatic liquid water content. Equivalent potential temperature.
14 February Lec. 25: Wet-bulb temperature. Normand’s Rule. Wet-bulb potential temperature.
15 February Lec. 26: Solving problems with the skew-T.
16 February Lec. 27: Static stability for moist parcel displacements. Conditional instability. Layer lifting and convective instability.
17 February Quiz
——— Week 8 ———————————————————————————————
20 February UW HOLIDAY: Presidents Day observed (no class)
21 February Lec. 28: Parcel method for assessing possibility of deep convection. Level of free convection. Convective available potential energy (CAPE). Convective inhibition.
22 February Lec. 29: Cloud formation processes. Types of clouds.
23 February Lec. 30: Homogeneous nucleation of cloud droplets. Kelvin’s equation.
24 February Quiz
——— Week 9 ———————————————————————————————
27 February Lec. 31: Atmospheric aerosol. Heterogeneous nucleation of droplets.
28 February Lec. 32: Köhler curves. Cloud condensation nuclei.
1 March Lec. 33: Growth of droplets by condensation.
2 March Lec. 34: Growth of drops by collisions and collection.
3 March Quiz
——— Week 10 ———————————————————————————————
6 March Lec. 35: Ice in clouds. Ice nucleation. Growth of ice particles from the vapor phase.
7 March Lec. 36: Ice particle habits. Growth of ice particles by riming and aggregation.
8 March Lec. 37: Thunderstorms. Artificial cloud seeding.
9 March Quiz
10 March Review and Student Evaluations
——— Finals Week —————————————————————————————
15 March FINAL EXAM