Related papers: Estimating Atmospheric Mass Using Air Density
Electricity in the atmosphere provides an ideal topic for educational outreach in environmental science. To support this objective, a simple instrument to measure real atmospheric electrical parameters has been developed and its performance…
How much wind energy does the atmosphere generate, and how much of it can at best be used as renewable energy? This review aims to give first-order estimates and sensitivities to answer these questions that are consistent with those…
Young terrestrial planets, when they are still embedded in a circumstellar disk, accumulate an atmosphere of nebula gas. The evolution and eventual evaporation of the protoplanetary disk affect the structure and dynamics of the planetary…
Our current sampling of the near-Earth space environment is wholly insufficient to measure the highly variable processes therein and make predictions on par with lower atmospheric weather. We sketch out the scientific rationale for a…
The climate and circulation of a terrestrial planet are governed by, among other things, the distance to its host star, its size, rotation rate, obliquity, atmospheric composition and gravity. Here we explore the effects of the last of…
Today's most detailed characterization of exoplanet atmospheres is accessible via transit spectroscopy (TS). Detecting transiting exoplanets only yields their size, and it is thus standard to measure a planet's mass before moving towards…
The accumulation of dark matter near the Earth is considered. We analyze the case of long range interaction forces. Additional density of the dark matter at the Earth's surface is calculated. We show that this density exceeds the mean…
Hyperspectral satellite images report greenhouse gas concentrations worldwide on a daily basis. While taking simple averages of these images over time produces a rough estimate of relative emission rates, atmospheric transport means that…
Environmental research aimed at monitoring and predicting O2 depletion is still lacking or in need of improvement, in spite of many attempts to find a relation between atmospheric gas content and climate variability. The aim of the present…
The conventional method to determine the cosmic curvature is to measure the total mass density $\Omega_{\rm tot}$. Unfortunately the observational $\Omega_{\rm tot}$ is closely near the critical value 1. The computation of this paper shows…
The quest for other habitable worlds and the search for life among them are major goals of modern astronomy. One way to make progress towards these goals is to obtain high-quality spectra of a large number of exoplanets over a broad range…
In addition to cosmological tests based on the mass function and clustering of galaxy clusters, which probe the growth of cosmic structure, nature offers two independent ways of using clusters to measure cosmic distances. The first uses…
A recently advanced argument against the atmospheric greenhouse effect is refuted. A planet without an infrared absorbing atmosphere is mathematically constrained to have an average temperature less than or equal to the effective radiating…
The power of atmospheric circulation is a key measure of the Earth's climate system. The mismatch between predictions and observations under a warming climate calls for a reassessment of how atmospheric power $W$ is defined, estimated and…
As a consequence of greenhouse forcing, all state of the art general circulation models predict a positive temperature trend that is greater for the troposphere than the surface. This predicted positive trend increases in value with…
Earth-like planets are expected to provide the greatest opportunity for the detection of life beyond the Solar System. However our planet cannot be considered a fair sample, especially if intelligent life exists elsewhere. Just as a…
Condensation and sublimation of water vapors (and CO2, CH4, N2O vapors also) in the Earth atmosphere must be accompanied by emission of latent heats on characteristic frequencies marked in absorption spectra. Calculated wave lengths…
The mean surface temperature on Earth and other planets with atmospheres is determined by the radiative balance between the non-reflected incoming solar radiation and the outgoing long-wave black-body radiation from the atmosphere. The…
New information has recently become available on the fundamental plane for various samples of early-type galaxies with redshift up to 1.3, both in clusters and in the field. This information is reviewed and clues are derived on the…
Mass is the most important stellar parameter, but it is not directly observable for a single star. Spherical model stellar atmospheres are explicitly characterized by their luminosity ($L_\star$), mass ($M_\star$) and radius ($R_\star$),…