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| Ocean Of Air |  Dave Thurlow, Host |
Where is the world's largest ocean? Well, if you include all fluids, including water AND air, it's above us! I'm Dave Thurlow and this is The Weather Notebook.
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Water fills the oceans of the world up to sea-level making it a liquid, a type of fluid. Liquids, to put it simply, are fluids with a top. Air isn't a liquid, it's a gas, another kind of fluid, and as a result, the atmosphere is far less enslaved by gravity than is the more dense liquid ocean. The atmosphere just kind of thins out into nothing, a few hundred miles above our heads. There is no atmosphere level like there is a sea level, a key difference in these two fluid oceans.
So air -- a gas, and water -- a liquid, are both fluid. Both make oceans, with currents and waves, and together move people around the planet. As for me, I think I'll just head out for a short swim, uh, walk across the bottom of the ocean of air.
The Weather Notebook is produced by the Mount Washington Observatory, funded by The National Science Foundation, and underwritten by Subaru, the beauty of All-Wheel Drive.
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Compiled and edited by: Dave Thurlow & Ralph Adler. North Conway: Mount Washington Observatory, 1999. Paperback, 150 pages. Soul of the Sky is a different kind of weather book. It's not preoccupied with charting fronts, defining what an isobar is, or trying to get you to memorize the conversion formula from degrees Centigrade to degrees Fahrenheit. Instead, it's a collection that illustrates how the weather can inspire and terrify, connect us and urge us on to new adventures, and invite us to gain a deeper appreciation of how weather and climate affect our everyday lives. |
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