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Old 21-October-2006, 02:38 PM
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Meteora Meteora is offline
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Almost everything in the original post is at least slightly in error, technically, but I'm not sure how one would improve it and have it still be understandable to a non-meteorologist, particularly one who is in 4th grade!

The only thing that jumped out as outright wrong was the assertion that wind causes evaporation. It doesn't. The only things that affect evaporation are temperature, atmospheric pressure, and the humidity in the immediate vicinity. Wind has no effect on evaporation rates when the atmosphere is at 100% relative humidity. When the RH is lower, though, it has the effect of replacing saturated air (next to the liquid water source) with air that isn't saturated. This does increase the rate of evaporation, but the wind isn't causing the evaporation. It's just providing a better environment for evaporation to occur.

Also - so far as I recall from my training, condensation does not occur without a non-water molecule being handy (a condensation nucleus).

If you haven't already, you might want to visit the Bad Meteorology website.

So... any plan to teach sublimation?
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