The water in the lake is up(lake = fat spot on a dammed river)(22 feet above normal pool level) after heavy rains up and downstream sail boat is in the lake, anchored at the end of my pathway brats and beer and good cheer on the boat of an evening canoeing and kayaking through a flooded forest If you ain't dumb enough to build and/or live in a floodplain this is great weather
Or downstream from a NC deregulated pigshit lagoon, downhill from coal ash dumpsite, or anywhere around an industrial waste site as in Harvey/Houston. Floods are not clean.
The reason we chose this spot is due to 2 mistakes (background info: the iowa portion of the plum river fault lies underneath the lake/reservoir) 1 The dam downstream was claimed to be "an earthen dam with a rubble cover" 2 The planets aligned that year and someone predicted that that could lead to increased tectonic activity So, I got some topographical maps and circled likely places to live, free of catastrophic flooding. however: 1 the dam has a concrete core covered in earth and rubble and 2 we had no noticeable shakers that year Sometimes you end up in the right place due to mistakes made along the way.
Been watching news reports about hurricane Florence Got to thinking about the tons of water in the sky Why does it not fall down in one lump? Why is it, sort of, 1 drop at a time? Is it made, sort of, 1 drop at a time? I can wear the wind can keep some drops airborne but if I was able to take say a Olympic size swimming pool block of water up and release it would it fall as a block? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
It's a gas, to begin with - that's how it got mixed up with the other gasses that we call "air". It condenses out of the air into liquid (or solid, often, ice) one drop at a time - condensing on dust motes and large molecules or sticking to the microsurfaces of growing drops or crystals, the growing bodies colliding and merging until they become too heavy for the motion of the air to support. Lots of rain is ice pellets that melted on the way down - it's cold at cloud height. The contest is between the tendency of water molecules to stick to stuff in formations, especially other water, and the kinetic energy of the collisions in the air that knock them apart (temperature and pressure, basically). Note that a water gas molecule is lighter than most other air gas molecules, and even condensing into ice does not get heavy rapidly - it's easier to suspend mist droplets than, say, rock dust or most smoke constituents. Wet air is lighter than dry air, all else being equal.
The atmosphere contains about 37.5 million billion gallons of water, at 8.34 pounds per gallon, that's roughly 312.75 million billion pounds of water suspended over your head. Damocles comes to mind.
Got it - one drop at a time Only later i thought of fire bombing aircraft Of course they drop the water a lot lower and it disperses due to forward movement of aircraft and wind resistance as it falls but in essence it drops all at once A helicopter at hight dropping a bucket load would disperse less than rain falling as it is created Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Thermodynamics. Water condensing takes energy. The hurricane can't supply it all at once. Initially, yes. The air would immediately shred it to bits as it fell. If it was very humid, then it would hit as very hard rain depending where you dropped it from. (The higher you were the more it would spread out.) If it was dry much of it would evaporate before it hit.
...and due to ocean heating... that amount is growing every minute...due to increasing rates of evaporation...I think someone suggested a current figure of 7% increase annually...(subscribed)
