The Atmosphere

This exercise is intended to reinforce the importance of Earth's atmosphere to living organisms. Topics include our bodies' interactions with the atmosphere; its composition and structure; and natural changes in the atmosphere (weather). Students will perform an actvity in which they are asked to observe and record weather conditions for four days, answer questions about their observations, and respond to a series of questions on general atmospheric characteristics. They will also learn how to convert temperature values from degrees Celsius to Fahrenheit. Educational levels: Undergraduate lower division, High school

An integrated wind risk warning model for urban rail transport in Shanghai, China

The integrated wind risk warning model for rail transport presented has four elements: Background wind data, a wind field model, a vulnerability model, and a risk model. Background wind data uses observations in this study. Using the wind field model with effective surface roughness lengths, the background wind data are interpolated to a 30-m resolution grid. In the vulnerability model, the aerodynamic characteristics of railway vehicles are analyzed with CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) modelling. In the risk model, the maximum value of three aerodynamic forces is used as the criteria to evaluate rail safety and to quantify the risk level under extremely windy weather. The full model is tested for the Shanghai Metro Line 16 using wind conditions during Typhoon Chan-hom. The proposed approach enables quick quantification of real- time safety risk levels during typhoon landfall, providing sophisticated warning information for rail vehicle operation safety

How Humans Change the Atmosphere

This exercise is designed to introduce students to the idea that human activities can alter the chemistry or gaseous composition of the atmosphere, resulting in a variety of impacts on human health and the environment. Discussion topics include indoor pollution and local (point- or non-point source) pollution. Students will perform an activity in which they use an online resource from the Environnmental Protection Agency (EPA) to research point-source polluters in the area where they live. They will identify facility names, addresses, potential environmental concerns, generate maps showing the locations of these sources, and answer questions about the information they uncover. Educational levels: Undergraduate lower division, High school

Acid Rain

Due to the presence of dissolved gases such as carbon dioxide, rainfall is naturally acidic. The release of other gases and chemicals such as sulfur dioxide during the combustion of coal and oil can cause rainfall to become even more acidic, sometimes to the point of toxicity. In this activity, students will measure the pH of local rainfall to see what effect these gases have in their region. They will also check an online resource to see how the releases of acid rain-causing chemicals have varied over the past 20 years, and answer questions about the information they uncover. Educational levels: Undergraduate lower division, High school

Hybrid Ventilation System and Soft-Sensors for Maintaining Indoor Air Quality and Thermal Comfort in Buildings

Maintaining both indoor air quality (IAQ) and thermal comfort in buildings along with optimized energy consumption is a challenging problem. This investigation presents a novel design for hybrid ventilation system enabled by predictive control and soft-sensors to achieve both IAQ and thermal comfort by combining predictive control with demand controlled ventilation (DCV). First, we show that the problem of maintaining IAQ, thermal comfort and optimal energy is a multi-objective optimization problem with competing objectives, and a predictive control approach is required to smartly control the system. This leads to many implementation challenges which are addressed by designing a hybrid ventilation scheme supported by predictive control and soft-sensors. The main idea of the hybrid ventilation system is to achieve thermal comfort by varying the ON/OFF times of the air conditioners to maintain the temperature within user-defined bands using a predictive control and IAQ is maintained using Healthbox 3.0, a DCV device. Furthermore, this study also designs soft-sensors by combining the Internet of Things (IoT)-based sensors with deep-learning tools. The hardware realization of the control and IoT prototype is also discussed. The proposed novel hybrid ventilation system and the soft-sensors are demonstrated in a real research laboratory, i.e., Center for Research in Automatic Control Engineering (C-RACE) located at Kalasalingam University, India. Our results show the perceived benefits of hybrid ventilation, predictive control, and soft-sensors

The upper atmosphere

Energy transfer, and heat sinks and sources in upper atmosphere for composition and temperature behavio

Lunar atmosphere

Solar wind, meteoric volatilization, and internal degassing contributing to lunar rarefied atmosphere, and transient contributions produced by rocket gases during lunar mission

U. S. Standard Atmosphere

U.s. standard atmosphere - 196