Thermodynamically consistent versions of approximations used in modelling moist air
Abstract
Some existing approaches to modeling the thermodynamics of moist air make approximations that break , such that the resulting thermodynamics do not obey the 1st and 2nd laws or have other inconsistencies. Recently, an approach to avoid such inconsistency has been suggested: the use of in terms of their , from which all thermodynamic quantities and relationships are derived. In this paper, we develop this approach for moist air thermodynamics and two widely used approximations: the constant approximation and the dry heat capacities approximation. The consistent constant approximation is particularly attractive because it leads to, when using virtual potential temperature as the thermodynamic variable, adiabatic dynamics that depend only on total mass, independent of the breakdown between water forms. Additionally, a wide variety of material from different sources in the literature on thermodynamics in atmospheric modelling is brought together. It is hoped that this paper provides a comprehensive reference for the use of thermodynamic potentials in atmospheric modelling, especially for the three systems considered here.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2204.00534,
title = {Thermodynamically consistent versions of approximations used in modelling moist air},
author = {Christopher Eldred and Mark Taylor and Oksana Guba},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.00534},
year = {2022}
}