FYFD

Tag: condensation

  • Building a Better Fog Harp

    Building a Better Fog Harp

    On arid coastlines, fog rolling in can serve as an important water source. Today’s fog collectors often use tight mesh nets. The narrow holes help catch tiny water particles, but they also clog easily. A few years ago, researchers suggested an alternative design — a fog harp inspired by coastal redwoods — that used closely spaced vertical wires to capture water vapor. At small scales, this technique worked well, but once scaled up to a meter-long fog harp, the strings would stick together once wet — much the way wet hairs cling to one another.

    The group has iterated on their design with a new hybrid that maintains the fog harp’s close vertical spacing but adds occasional cross-wires to stabilize. Laboratory tests are promising, with the new hybrid fog harp collecting water with 2 – 8 times the efficiency of either a conventional mesh or their original fog harp. The team notes that even higher efficiencies are possible with electrification. (Image credit: A. Parrish; research credit: J. Kaindu et al.; via Ars Technica)

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  • Penguin Poo Seeds Antarctic Clouds

    Penguin Poo Seeds Antarctic Clouds

    Forming clouds requires more than just water vapor; every droplet in a cloud forms around a tiny aerosol particle that serves as a seed that vapor can condense onto. Without these aerosols, there are no clouds. In most regions of the world, aerosols are plentiful — produced by vegetation, dust, sea salt, and other sources. But in the Antarctic, aerosol sources are few. But a new study shows that penguins help create aerosols with their feces.

    Penguin feces is ammonia-rich, and that ammonia, when combined with sulfur compounds from marine phytoplankton, triggers chemistry that releases new aerosol particles. The researchers measured ammonia carried on the wind from nearby penguin colonies and found that the birds are a large ammonia source, producing 100 to 1000 times the region’s baseline ammonia levels. In combination with another ingredient in penguin guano, the researchers found the penguins boosted aerosol production 10,000-fold. That means penguins can actually influence their environment, helping to create clouds that keep Antarctica cooler. (Image credit: H. Neufeld; research credit: M. Boyer et al.; via Eos)

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    “Monsoon 7”

    Storm-chasing photographer Mike Olbinski (previously) returns with another stunning timelapse of summer thunderstorms in the western U.S. I never tire of watching the turbulent convection, microbursts, billowing haboobs, and undulating clouds Olbinski captures. His work is always a reminder of the incredible power and energy contained in our atmosphere and unleashed in cycles of warming and cooling, evaporation and condensation. (Video and image credit: M. Olbinski)

  • Wave Clouds in the Atacama

    Wave Clouds in the Atacama

    Striped clouds appear to converge over a mountaintop in this photo, but that’s an illusion. In reality, these clouds are parallel and periodic; it’s only the camera’s wide-angle lens that makes them appear to converge.

    Wave clouds like these form when air gets pushed up and over topography, triggering an up-and-down oscillation (known as an internal wave) in the atmosphere. At the peak of the wave, cool moist air condenses water vapor into droplets that form clouds. As the air bobs back down and warms, the clouds evaporate, leaving behind a series of stripes. You can learn more about the physics behind these clouds here and here. (Image credit: Y. Beletsky; via APOD)

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  • Lenticular Landscape

    Lenticular Landscape

    Mountain ridgelines push oncoming winds up and over their peaks, creating the conditions for some spectacular condensation. If the displaced air is moist enough, it cools and condenses into a cloud that appears to hover over the peak. In reality, winds are constantly moving up and over the mountain, condensing into visible cloud where the temperature is cool enough and then morphing back to water vapor once temperatures increase. This process can create stacked lenticular clouds like those seen here. This spot in New Zealand sees lenticular clouds so often that the formation has its own name: Taieri Pet! (Image credit: satellite image – L. Dauphin, b/w – National Library; via NASA Earth Observatory)

    Black-and-white photo of an instance of the Taieri Pet lenticular cloud structure.
    Black-and-white photo of an instance of the Taieri Pet lenticular cloud structure.
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    Serpents and Ouroboros

    Beads of condensation on a cooling, oil-slicked surface have a dance all their own in this video. Large droplets gobble up their fellows as they follow serpentine paths; each new droplet donates its interfacial energy to feed the larger drop’s kinetic energy. Eventually, the big drops switch to a circular path, like an ouroboros, the tail-eating serpent of mythology. This transition happens due to the oil shifted by the dancing droplets. You can recreate the effect at home by rubbing a thin layer of oil over glass and setting it atop a hot mug of your favorite beverage. (Video and image credit: M. Lin et al.; research credit: M. Lin et al.)

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    Spreading Frost

    Condensation forms beads of water on a surface. When suddenly cooled, those drops begin to freeze into frost. This video looks at the process in optical and in infrared, revealing the patterns of spreading frost and the tiny ice bridges that link one freezing drop to the next. (Video and image credit: D. Paulovics et al.)

  • Fog in the Blue Ridge Mountains

    Fog in the Blue Ridge Mountains

    Fog blankets the forest of the Blue Ridge Mountains in this photo by Tihomir Trichkov. It gives the photo the quality of an Impressionist painting. Rain from the day before left lots of moisture in the air and soil, contributing to the ethereal condensation lit by the sunrise. (Image credit: T. Trichkov; via Gizmodo)

  • Ominous Mammatus

    Ominous Mammatus

    Mammatus clouds are fairly unusual and often look quite dramatic. Most clouds have flat bottoms, caused by the specific height and temperature at which their droplets condense. But mammatus clouds have bubble-like bottoms that are thought to form when large droplets of water or ice sink as they evaporate. Although they can occur in the turbulence caused by a thunderstorm, mammatus clouds themselves are not a storm cloud. They appear in non-stormy skies, too. The clouds are particularly striking when they’re lit from the side, as in the image above. (Image credit: J. Olson; via APOD)

  • Inhibiting Marine Lightning

    Inhibiting Marine Lightning

    Thunderstorms over the ocean have substantially less lightning than a similar storm over land. Scientists wondered whether this difference could be due to lower cloud bases over the ocean or differences in the cloud droplets’ nuclei. But a new study instead implicates coarse sea spray as the deciding factor. By tracking the full lifetime of storm systems through remote sensing, the team found that fine aerosols can increase lightning activity over both land and ocean. But adding coarse sea salt from sea spray reduced lightning by 90% regardless of fine aerosols. With sea salt in the mix, clouds seem to develop fewer but larger condensation droplets, providing less opportunity for the electrification necessary to generate lightning. (Image credit: Z. Tasi; research credit: Z. Pan et al.)