Abstract
The most popular state variables that are used to define a thermodynamic system are the pressure, the temperature, and the composition. For our purpose, the atmospheric composition is divided into two main constituents: dry air, comprising nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, etc., and water in its various states or phases including water vapour (referred to herein as moisture), liquid water in the form of suspended cloud or rain droplets, ice crystals, and snowflakes.
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Notes
- 1.
CAPE is normally defined as the integral of positive buoyancy between LFC and LNB (see below). Here we make a more general introduction of this concept for the sake of completeness. Although, maybe not practical in general there is no reason why we can’t define the available potential energy of a moist parcel of air that gets entrained by an existing updraft or one that gets detrained into the environment below LFC. In fact the latter situation is exploited in Chapters 6 through 12 to introduce the notion of low-level CAPE for parcels detraining below the freezing level and lead to the formation of congestion clouds.
References
Kerry A. Emanuel. Atmospheric Convection. Oxford University Press, 1994.
Adrian E. Gill. Atmosphere–Ocean Dynamics, volume 30 of International Geophysics Series. Academic Press, 1982.
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Khouider, B. (2019). Moisture and Moist Thermodynamics. In: Models for Tropical Climate Dynamics. Mathematics of Planet Earth, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17775-1_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17775-1_2
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