English

Thermodynamically consistent versions of approximations used in modelling moist air

Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics 2022-09-05 v3

Abstract

Some existing approaches to modeling the thermodynamics of moist air make approximations that break thermodynamic consistency\textit{thermodynamic consistency}, 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 thermodynamic potentials\textit{thermodynamic potentials} in terms of their natural variables\textit{natural variables}, from which all thermodynamic quantities and relationships are derived. In this paper, we develop this approach for unapproximated\textit{unapproximated} moist air thermodynamics and two widely used approximations: the constant κ\kappa approximation and the dry heat capacities approximation. The consistent constant κ\kappa approximation is particularly attractive because it leads to, when using virtual potential temperature θv\theta_v 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}
}