Can you keep an open mind on the cause of winds? Climate science needs your help!
by Anastassia Makarieva
Many of us who have become researchers have been attracted by the dynamic and constructive debate that lies at the heart of scientific progress. Every theory is provisional waiting to be improved or replaced by a more thorough understanding. In this perspective new ideas are the life-blood of progress and are welcomed and examined eagerly by all concerned. That’s what we believed and were inspired by. Is climate science a dynamic field of research that welcomes new ideas? We hope so – though our faith is currently being tested.
Five months have not been enough to find two representatives of the climate science community who would be willing to act as referees and publicly evaluate a new theory of winds. Of the ten experts requested to act as referees only one accepted. This slow and uncertain progress has caused the Editors to become concerned: recently they “indefinitely extended” the public discussion of the submitted manuscript. The review process is perhaps becoming the story.
Here the authors share their views and request help.
Background
On August 06 2010 our paper “Where do winds come from? A new theory on how water vapor condensation influences atmospheric pressure and dynamics” was submitted to the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions (ACPD) journal of the European Geosciences Union. There we proposed a new mechanism for wind generation based on pressure gradients produced by the condensation of water vapor. ACPD ensures transparency during the review procedure: the submitted manuscripts and subsequent reviews are published online and available for public discussion. Authors can follow their submission through the process: they see when the Editor invites referees and whether they accept or decline.
Here are the standings as of 20 January 2011:
The Editor handling our paper has invited ten referees so far. Only one, Dr. Judith Curry, accepted. After 10 November 2010, in the record there have been no further attempts to find referees.
Normally ACPD’s discussion should take eight weeks. But in early January 2011, after twelve weeks in process, the status of the discussion of our manuscript was changed to “indefinitely extended”. In a recent letter to the authors, the Editor-in-Chief admitted that handling ‘a controversial paper’ is not easy, but assured us that the Journal is doing their best.
Discussion of our propositions secured over a thousand comments in the blogosphere within four weeks of publication indicating wide interest. Among the ACPD discussion participants two are active bloggers. Does blog culture outcompete formal peer review in evaluating novel concepts? It’s an open question. But let’s take a moment to focus on science.
Why condensation-induced dynamics is important
It would be generally useful to understand why the winds blow. It is sufficient to note that understanding the physical bases of atmospheric circulation is key for determining the climate sensitivity to changes in the amounts of atmospheric greenhouse substances, which is currently a highly controversial topic. The lack of current understanding may not be widely recognized outside the climate and meteorological community. But within the community moist processes in the atmosphere are admitted to be among the least understood and associated with greatest challenges. Not only theorists, but also modelers recognize their existence. For example, in a paper titled “The real holes in climate science” Schiermeier (2010) identified the inability to adequately explain precipitation patterns as one of such holes. In particular,
“a main weakness of the[ir] models is their limited ability to simulate vertical air movement, such as convection in the tropics that lifts humid air into the atmosphere.”
Any meteorological textbook will provide a discussion of buoyancy-based convection: how a warm air parcel ascends being lighter than the surrounding air. The convective instability of moist saturated air, so far neglected by the meteorological theory, is different. Any upward displacement of a saturated air volume, even a random fluctuation, leads to cooling. This causes the water vapour to condense. Condensation diminishes the total amount of gas and thus disrupts the hydrostatic distribution of moist air (if a hydrostatic equilibrium exists it is unstable to any such minor movements). The conclusion: moist saturated atmosphere in the gravitational field cannot be static.
Our analyses show that the current understanding of air movements being dominated by temperature and buoyancy is incomplete and flawed. Rather we find that the phase changes of water (condensation and evaporation) can play a much larger role than has previously been recognized. You can find out more if you see our paper. We would hope that a dynamic and advancing science would welcome new ideas.
Can the blogosphere help?
Perhaps we can help the Journal review our paper with your help. Are you an open minded climate scientist who would be ready and competent to discuss our ideas?
The ACP Chief-Executive Editor Dr. Ulrich Pöschl is aware that we are inviting your helps and asked that the following issues be noted (we quote):
1) ACPD is not a blog but a scientific discussion forum for the exchange of substantial scientific comments by scientific experts.
2) The open call for scientific experts who would be ready to act as potential referees would be a private initiative of the manuscript authors.
3) The list of potential referees compiled by the authors will be treated like the suggestions for potential referees regularly requested. The responsibility and authority for selecting and appointing referees rests exclusively with the editor.
If you have no conflict of interests and are willing to review our paper please contact the corresponding author (A. Makarieva) and we will forward your details to the Editor as a potential referee. For those who would like to remain anonymous please approach the ACP Chief-Executive Editor directly. We would be very grateful for your help – we have faith in you.
Anastassia Makarieva
on behalf of the authors:
A.M. Makarieva, V.G. Gorshkov, D. Sheil, A.D. Nobre, B.-L. Li
P.S. Thanks to Jeff for hosting our appeal on this blog. For a list of publications relevant to condensation-induced dynamics, please, see here.
sky
January 21, 2011 at 5:23 pm
Thank you for your continued interest. In a nutshell, the physical mechanism that is proposed: the area where condensation occurs becomes a low pressure area due to continuous removal of gas from the gas phase. The air from the neighborhood streams to that area and ascends there sustaining condensation. Deprived of moisture, it returns to ‘the neighborhood’ in the upper atmosphere and, as matter conservation prescribes, descends there. There is no condensation in the descending air. So, every circulation pattern driven by condensation will necessarily have a ‘descending’ part with no condensation.
What are the grounds for a statement that condensation is a micro- or mesoscale process? What does such a statement mean at all? Molecular collisions are ‘microscale’ as well, but this does not prevent the ideal gas law from being globally applicable to the atmosphere.
If we look globally, clouds cover over 50% of the planetary surface. This means that the area that are permanently affected by condensation IS globally significant. Such a pattern also indicates that the ascending and descending regions of condensation-induced circulation patterns are, on average, of approximately the same size.
In the post we provided a link for those interested in what and where has been recently published on this topic. We are not aiming to get a particular paper published. Our goal is to generate interest and provoke a discussion in the climate community.
Anastassia Makarieva says: (January 22, 2011 at 12:21 am)
Our goal is to generate interest and provoke a discussion in the climate community.
I can only offer interest, M’am; and you have certainly generated that in this reader.
Mike Mangan says:
January 21, 2011 at 4:23 pm
Here’s our lovely author…
http://thd.pnpi.spb.ru/~makariev/
Thanks Mike, never argue with beauty.
I second Lucy’s call to try to integrate this work with Erl Happ’s.
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So meteorologists don’t comprehend thermodynamics AND fundamentals of chemistry. What else is new?
For separation of tiny droplets of liquid H2O, preventing raindrops coalescing into large enough drops to fall, try static electricity. Pith balls in a Leyden jar. Clouds have extremely large negative electrical charges, doth causes the lightning to discharge huge numbers of electrons from clouds to ground (earth) in lightning strokes, allowing the finely divided H2O particles to come together, and fall as raindrops to the ground.
In case no one noticed, the larger and faster the number of lightning strokes, the faster and larger the raindrops fall and become. Simple observation.
Ms. Anastassia Makarieva,
Are you saying the “consensus” science does not think that the pressure loss or “vacuum” obtained by condensation of water vapor in the atmosphere is a very significant cause of winds? If yes, then they are missing a lot and your paper is very interesting and important. Bravo!
Bernd Felsche
January 21, 2011 at 10:46 pm
Thank you forthis comment. This is how things are conventionally represented in models. In reality, in the presence of condensation, partial pressure pv of the condensable gas — water vapor — represents another store of potential energy. Namely this energy (not latent heat) has been so far neglected. When an air volume containing saturated water vapor is adiabatically displaced upwards and some vapor condenses, there appears an upward-directed pressure gradient force that is available to accelerate air.
This force is related to the decrease in the amount of gas, not to the amount of heat released. Just appreciate that these two processes are physically different and governed by different physical constants: theoretically, we can have a chemical reaction in the atmosphere that would not change the amount of gas molecules but lead to either release or uptake of heat. On the other hand, we could have a reaction that changes the amount of gas molecules but does not lead to any appreciable heat release or uptake. All emphasis in meteorological theory has been the effects of latent heat release. The formation of pressure gradient force (the dynamic aspect of condensation) due to the change of the amount of gas has not received the needed consideration.
Readers interested in specific details on how the potential energy from condensation was neglected in a numerical model designed to described a moist atmosphere (while latent heat release taken into account), please, read here starting from Section 2 on the bottom of p. C12009. Warning: this may demand the acquaintance with the other materials in the discussion.
The ten reviewers who refused to review the publication in a sense say “I do not believe it, but I am not confident in my physics knowledge enough to refute it with a QED at the end”.
I will nominate three other possible reviewers. Hopefully they have not already been asked. Richard Lindzen of MIT, Petr Chylek of Los Alamos National Laboratory or Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven National Laboratory. Surely one of those guys would be interested, although they might not have the time.
Quick question. I just read Judith Curry’s review of the paper. She concludes that if a few issues with the paper were corrected, the paper could be published. Has a corrected version of the paper been completed and submitted? Or are the authors convinced they are right and Curry is wrong?
Anastassia,
Perhaps you can justify the assumption of an adiabatic process. It’s probably close to valid for gases which don’t radiate well, but significant water vapour and the formation of liquid condensate facilitates radiative heat losses. i.e. they can cool without necessarily experiencing an expansion or collision with cooler molecules.
I admit that I’ve only briefly scanned your papers and not worked through them to gain a full appreciation of how you think.
Ron Cram:
January 22, 2011 at 7:11 am
Normally the review procedure in the journal should run as follows. There are eight weeks for public discussion. Then the discussion is closed. Two referees should have submitted their comments by that time. Then the authors are given four weeks to publicly reply to all comments, including those of the referees, and then submit a revised version.
Since the process entered a stage when the discussion is indefinitely extended and there are not enough referees, we are unable to submit a revised version. We are now working on our response to Dr. Curry as well as to other commentators and will post them as soon as we are ready. I would prefer not to reply here in the right/wrong terms. Needless to say that we highly value the interest of Dr. Curry in our work and respect her opinions irrespective of whether we agree with them or not. We also appreciate contributions from all the discussion participants.
Thank you very much for your suggestion of referees. The point is that people should be interested in our work. We chose this form of the general appeal because we would like to avoid contacting knowledgeable persons whom we personally do not know and imposing our work on them. This is what the Editors have presumably done with little success. We have also provided a list of several potential referees at the time of submission.
Please, if you know people who would be interested, be so kind to pass this information to them (if you find this appropriate) such that they could contact me (ammakarieva at gmail dot com) or the ACP Chief-Executive Editor (address here).
Anastassia Makarieva:
How about one of these fellows:
Ralf D. Tscheuschner
Gerhard Gerlich
Their paper: Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics is a heavy-duty treatise in thermodynamics.
Bernd
True they can cool by radiation. But the matter is they do cool by expansion which necessarily occurs as the air ascends. The adiabatic assumption is not critical: if, as the moist air ascends and condensation occurs, some part of latent heat released is lost to radiation, the vertical temperature gradient will be steeper than the moist adiabatic one while the condensational pressure gradient force will be larger.
In order condensation to occur in the ascending air and the pressure gradient force to arise, the vertical temperature lapse rate (whether adiabatic or not, does not matter) must exceed a certain critical value, which is determined from the equation hv = h. (Scale height hv of saturated vapor, dictated by the lapse rate, coincides with the hydrostatic scale height h = RT/Mg). In this case water vapor is saturated everywhere in the column, but no condensation happens as the moist air ascends. On Earth the critical G is about 1.9 K/km. This is a small gradient compared to the mean tropospheric lapse rate of 6.5 K/km.
Bernd
Consider the simplest case: a pure vapor atmosphere over a flat isothermal Earth. Let us introduce a sufficiently large vertical temperature gradient. In this case there is much saturated vapor above the warm oceanic surface and very little in the upper cold atmosphere. The vertical pressure gradient of saturated vapor is highly non-equilibrium (i.e., hv is much smaller than h) due to large temperature gradient.
Governed by this upward pressure gradient force, there will appear a unidirectional upward motion of vapor that will condense in the upper atmosphere and return to the surface as liquid drops. (Note that in order this to be possible, all latent heat that is released in the upper atmosphere should be disposed to space via radiation. But this condition is implicitly accounted for after we have specified the temperature lapse rate.)
If we now add non-condensable gases the ‘circulation’ can no longer be 1-D imensional, because, unlike vapor which turns to liquid, dry air has nowhere to go as it ascends but to go downward somewhere else. We will witness an appearance of circulation cells that include both horizontal and vertical parts. This is what the condensation-induced dynamics is about.
Anastasia Makarieva wrote:
Consider the simplest case: a pure vapor atmosphere over a flat isothermal Earth.
Another simple case is a Cloud Chamber.
There appears to be a similar process at work on Titan, with Nitrogen and Methane.
Anastassia Makarieva says:
January 22, 2011 at 12:21 am
“What are the grounds for a statement that condensation is a micro- or mesoscale process? What does such a statement mean at all?”
The grounds are direct physical observation. Certainly the condensation of individual cloud droplets occurs on a microscopic scale and in the case of radiation fog is a microclimatic phenomenon–one not accompanied by any visible movement of the air mass. Thermally driven popcorn clouds are likewise microclimatic in scale and their formation create at best meso–scale horizontal pressure gradients, such as drive shallow, gentle sea breezes that never extend more than tens of kilometers inland. Hurricanes, of course, produce great winds and rain, but they are likewise meso-scale. Monsoons are perhaps the best bet for demonstrating your mechanism on a larger scale. Do you have any conclusive evidence from field measurements at that scale? And while clouds may cover roughly half the global surface at any time, that does not mean that they are being PRODUCED over a comparable area. As global satellite views clearly show, they tend to spread widely from the tropics into zones of westerly winds. Neither those winds, nor the “haboobs” that sweep sporadically across the Sahara (let alone the hemispheric dust storms on Mars) can be convincingly attributed to condensation.
I do applaud your work in elucidating a mechanism that has been sorely neglected in meteorology. But I would urge you temper your enthusiasm for its explanatory power with mature consideration of other dynamic mechanisms and the evidence from direct measurements. Great scientists have long understood that the latter can destroy beautiful theories.
Wasn’t it anna v who best explicated that ultimately it will be data that vindicates you or not, and that such data retrieval and analysis is beyond your scope at present? It seemed that she best placed the problematic aspects of eq. 34 in perspective, too. So, I nominate her.
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Without getting into the deep scientific arguments, lets just look at what happens in the real world from a glider piot’s point of view. (Guess what my online name means).
A glider pilot is losing altitude at his minimum sink rate of 150 feet per minute (fpm). As he approaches a developing thermal, that sink rate may increase to 300 fpm or more down, and as his altitude drops the poilot may even start to look for somewhere to land. Then Eureka, at 1000′ above ground he hits a weak thermal and starts to climb. His climb may initialy be 200 fpm which means the air around him is actually climbing at 350 fpm. For that air mass to be rising, there must be wind on the ground driving in to replace that rising air.
The glider pilot looks up, and somewhere above him he sees a cumulus cloud with a nice dark base. Now as he climbs slowly up towards that cloud, his rate of climb increases; maybe to 500 fpm. So where is the energy coming from to cause that air mass to be moving faster. Obviously there is a pressure difference as he approaches the cloud and air is being drawn in the side of the thermal. The hot ground may have been the kicker, but it is what is happening inside the cloud that is now providing the lift. At cloud base it is common for glider pilots to have to open their air brakes to prevent being sucked up into the cloud. Yes, I do mean “sucked up” as it is no longer the thermal energy from the ground that is the driving force.
So here is a practical example of condensation within the cloud causing localised winds at altitude. Maybe it is relevent to this paper and hence worthwhile looking at the subject on a broader scale. Or is a localised phenonenum not revelevent to macro meteorology?
Steve says:
This is wrong. First of all, the thermal energy of a gas that expands will decrease by the 1st Law of Thermodynamics because the gas does work on the environment. (Not true for so-called “free expansion” but that really isn’t relevant here.) This is in fact the reason why gases cool as they expand.
Second of all, the temperature of an ideal gas is proportional to the energy per particle, not the energy per unit volume. In particle, for a monotonic gas, the thermal energy is (3/2)N*k_B*T where N is the number of atoms, k_B is Boltzmann’s constant and T is the absolute temperature.
Yeah…For one thing, Sheehan is confused but what “adiabatic cooling” means. It means there is no exchange of energy with the surroundings via heat…However, there is still the exchange of energy via work. Also, when one talks of a parcel of air in the atmosphere undergoing adiabatic expansion when it rises, that means it does not exchange heat with its environment. It does not necessarily mean that there can’t be heat exchange within the system, e.g., between the water and the non-condensable gas.
An analogy would be if you put an ice cube in hot water inside a calorimeter (which a styrofoam cup can serve as a fair approximation of in a pinch). To the extent that the calorimeter is perfect, there is no heat exchange with the surroundings but there is still heat exchange between the ice cube and the water.
(I just gave my introductory physics students a test on thermodynamics, which is why I am in a bit didactic on this subject.)
Jim F says:
If you want two physicists who have shown a profound misunderstanding of basic principles of thermodynamics, then that might be the way to go. Otherwise, probably not such a good idea.
I think my question got lost in spam because I inadvertently first posted in another discussion.
Lucy Skywalker
January 21, 2011 at 3:36 pm
These are complex questions. As I said above, any condensation-induced circulation pattern has a low pressure zone where condensation and ascending motion occur and a high pressure zone where the air descends. One such low pressure zone is located near the equator. In our paper we show that the condensation-induced pressure gradients coincide with those observed in the Hadley cell (trade winds).
In principle, the high pressure zone could have been located somewhere at the poles, such that the Hadley circulation extended over the entire hemisphere. The existence of an additional low pressure zone to which your referred is due to the fact that Hadley cell is smaller than that. Can we estimate the size of Hadley cell (not only pressure gradients, but also the size) using our theory? In other words, is there a maximum size for a condensation-induced circulation? It looks like there is and we can estimate it. This work is in progress.
If there is a maximum cell size and it is smaller than the distance between the equator and the pole, this will cause several cells to co-exist in each hemisphere and lead to formation of at least one more low pressure zone, like the one you referred to. This is what actually happens: there are Hadley, Ferrel and polar cells.
The second question is why the intermediate low pressure zones are not symmetrical between the southern and northern hemispheres. This apparently has to do with the continental masses and distribution of vegetation. In the Northern hemisphere we have vast Siberian forests (plus Canadian forests) where evaporation patterns are different from evaporation from the oceanic surface. This is true both in winter (when trees are covered with snow providing extra evaporative surfaces) and in summer where there is active transpiration of plants. This causes the low pressure zone to become more diffused and spread over the continent rather than being concentrated over the ocean. This may have to do with the fact that in summer the number of Arctic cyclones (low pressure systems) decreases compared to winter.
I can almost hear them….
“Silly English man, we will taunt you!!!”… “Run Away…. ”
Were I able to be counted as a reviewer, I’d sign up in a heart beat. It looks like a very interesting question, and paper.
IMHO, we are in a transition. In the beginning, publishing was very rare, costly, and hard, but was done subtanitally ad. hoc. and folks like Einstein were “reviewed” by folks they talked with more or less frequently. Then it became a ‘business’ and “journals” found money in monopoly of “review process”. Lately some folks found power in control of the “review process” and climategate was born….
Now, perhaps, it is time to return to that point where ‘review’ happens under a bright carbon arc spot light… “Publishing” literally costs nothing. ( I run a blog with thousands of daily readers at zero cost, for example) So perhaps it is a good time for “peer review” to happen more quickly, and more in the light of day (or carbon arc 😉 and with less money changing hands ( i.e. exactly WHY is publicly funded research behine a paywall? Hmmm? )
So Kudos to these brave souls with a sound idea and a courageous heart. Let them go forth and contend with the old dragons… And may the best non-dragon win…
@chris Reeve in: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/21/an-appeal-to-the-climate-science-blogosphere/#comment-579727
Are ye a Scottsman lad? Or perhaps a Celt of some other sort? I ca’ ne read yoor writings but that I hear the lilt in what ye say… ‘N ken it I do…
I think you’ve got it rrrright…
Clausius-Capeyron law:the colder the air becomes with increasing height, the less saturated water vapor it can bear.
I don’t understand this. I thought that for water vapour to condense the air had to be at least 100% humidity, and more, supersaturated and isn’t this the same to form snowflakes? Doesn’t most rain even in summer start off as ice crystals?
Water vapour in higher colder air expands and become less dense when it is doing this, displacing the air, but anyway, I thought water vapour wasn’t bothered by how cold air was, if it could get to it it could saturate it.