Light Scattering in the Sky

Click/Tap on the Box below to go through my explanation.   Enjoy!

Humidity, Stop Stealing My Damn Heat

            I was born and raised in the mile high city­ – aka Denver, Colorado. (The nickname has since become even more appropriate).  As you may know, the weather in Colorado is rather chaotic.  In the 7th grade, I woke up to a foot of snow that appeared overnight and knocked out our power. My mom sure had a good laugh making me think I was late for school and tricked me into running all the way to there, even though it was canceled.  Later as my friends and I went out to enjoy our day off, the sun came out and melted all of the snow by 2pm.  But, aside from the chaotic weather that is so characteristic of my hometown, I’d say another defining feature about the climate is how absolutely dry it can be there. When I go back I am at risk of cracked knuckles and bloody noses…not from fighting, just from existing.  Regardless, I personally much prefer dry weather to humid weather and for two main reasons: I hate damp towels. Like, can’t I just be dry at…some point?  Please!? And moreover, the dry climate makes the chaotic swings in temperature less noticeable and the ‘cold’ winters less harsh. I didn’t truly appreciate that until I moved to Chicago, where it is both colder and more humid. 

On a walk next to the lake on a cold Chicago winter day, February 1st, 2015.  The humidity was around 89% in Chicago. Denver was actually at an average 83% that day.   But Denver's humidity changed like crazy that week.  Here are the details.

       If you are well versed in winter weather, you might have noticed how 0˚F in Denver feels so much warmer than 0˚F in say, Pennsylvania.  Or maybe you’ve just walked outside on different days and noticed that the 25˚F today feels much colder than the 25˚F a week ago.  So, why exactly does the humidity make it seem colder in the winter time? Well, as strange as this may (or mot not) sound, it is for the same reason that humidity makes it feel so hot and muggy in the summertime.  As I talked about in my post ‘Hot Showers and Global Warming’, water is able to shake at lower frequencies and can thereby trap heat, a lower frequency light. During the summer there is an abundance of heat and it gets trapped in the air by the humidity, making you feel hot and muggy.   But, during the winter there is very little heat to be found around…except from our hot bodies.  That damn humidity just steals the heat that radiates off of us and thereby makes us feel colder.  Looking at it in a slightly different way: The humidity does a better job at conducting heat away from our bodies than the drier air.  The higher the humidity, the better the conduction of heat and thereby the quicker your body cools.

            Okay.  I have to take a physicist moment here to clarify that other factors could be causing similar affects.  Wind, for example, can make it feel colder, but not because the heat conduction of the air is increasing, so as much as new air particles (which are colder) are constantly being pushed past your body.  Or maybe you are somehow sweating in the middle of winter (hey, it happens to me), then you’re experiencing evaporative cooling.   I guess what I am saying is that humidity trapping heat isn’t THE reason you feel cold, but it is one of the many things that COULD explain what is going on. (Science inherently is a specialty of caveats and asterisks, cause it is studying the effects of minute changes in an otherwise complex systems...actually, this is deserves a post. Later).

           Okay, back to humidity. I just took two points on a spectrum: dry and humid. As you increase the humidity, you increase the number of heat trapping water molecules, thereby making it easier to steal heat away from you body (or to trap more heat in the summer). But what if you go beyond just being humid and instead you under go a phase transition and the humidity goes from being gas to liquid.  Now you have an even higher density of heat trapping humidity, also known as water.  This principle of ‘stealing heat’ (or heat conduction) is exactly the reason that you can’t really stand to be in 50˚F water for too long, but you have less of in an issue walking around in cloudy 50˚F weather. 

     Now, that’s all fine and dandy.   Water shakes and absorbs heat. Woohoo. But I’d like to pose a question to you: Does water just shake at one frequency? 

Some Earnest Thoughts for later!

Hot Showers and Global Warming

     If you’re anything like me, you enjoy taking really hot showers.  I mean, showers to the point that it slightly burns your skin. I love them so much. They relax my muscles and help me fall asleep, AND I love how the bathroom turns into my own temporary steam room. The steam helps warm up the bathroom and makes the transition into my cold Chicago apartment happen when IM ready. I choose when to open the door to the cold cold living room. (…heating an entire Chicago apartment can be a bit too expensive sometimes.) 

     But why exactly does steam trap the heat so well? This has to do with the fact that water, the ‘triangular’ diatomic H­­2O molecule, is able to vibrate at lower frequencies, which then allows heat to be absorbed by the molecules.  (Saying this in a science-y way: The diatomic molecule structure has low frequency vibrational modes that allow them to trap the lower frequency light that is heat. I believe this lower frequency property comes from the shape of the molecule…but that’s a post for anther time.)  Now that these atoms can absorb the heat, it allows the heat to linger around instead of dissipating or being absorbed by something else in the room. But the moment you open up the door, all that wonderful heat leaves and you eventually get a cold bathroom again.  But perhaps you want to make the transition a little less sudden, so you just crack the door.  Then the bathroom will still loose the heat eventually…but it’ll take longer than if you open it up all the way.

     This whole process of trapping heat and letting the heat escape is very similar to that of the global warming process, with a few important distinctions. Instead of a hot showerhead, we have the sun that is providing the heat. And now it’s not the sun that is providing the heat trapping molecules (i.e. greenhouse gases), but rather the earth’s climate and human activity that provides the various gas molecules that can trap heat. (Water happens to be one of these gases, but we also have CO­­2, CH­4 and others.)  And instead of a door that we get to easily open and close, we have an atmosphere that protects us from the cold cold outer space. As we add more greenhouse gases, we slowly close the door and make it easier for our atmosphere to trap the heat that is being provided by the sun. (Or, on the flipside, if there weren’t enough of these gases, our earth would just be a big ball of ice.)

     While I thought that this analogy was interesting in it’s own right (Hey, Im a huge nerd after all), I think it’s a important point to show that it is absolutely indisputable that humans are contributing to the warming of the earth, just by the fact that we are adding greenhouse gases. Sure, we may not get to decide exactly how much we close the ‘door’ to outer space, there are a lot of different factors at play, but we certainly have some say. (And, yes, this heat-trapping trait alone doesn’t prove that humans are driving climate change…but I’ll get to the other details later.) Now­– in the spirit of fairness – just cause most scientific evidence tells us that humans are driving global warming doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider the economic impacts of transitioning to a greener form of energy. But I’d be so freaking happy if some politicians will actually start doing their job and approach these problem in a honest manner, rather that just saying the easy thing to get the votes.

How Education and Outreach has helped me.

First and foremost, I know I would not be where I am today if it wasn’t for the many different teachers in my life. From learning how to play chess with my counselor to gaining an immense passion for understanding how things work in my physics class, or Camp Rising Sun where I met people from all around the world and had counselors who started my interests in theatre, each of experiences helped build the foundation for my personality.

In my senior year of high school I was given the opportunity to build upon my foundation at UC Berkeley, with the immense help of the Bill Daniels Foundation and their scholarship program. Once I arrived to Cal, I had the wonderful opportunity to join two outreach programs. The Cal Independent Scholars Network (CISN) helped provided me with a community of kindred spirits and two wonderful mentors, all of whom were a strong support source in times of stress. In my second year at Cal I was fortunate to be accepted into the Cal New Experience in Research and Diversity in Science (NERDS) program. Through this program I was able to get paid to work in the lab of two physics professors at two different University of California schools and to be a part of a diverse community of people who were interested in pursuing science at a higher level. We were a support system for each other, with several wonderful mentors to guide us through the process of applying to graduate school.

* Knowing that each and everyone of these programs and mentors helped me get to where I am today has driven me to paying it forward, so to speak.*

My Top 2014 Songs

Here is a list of my favorite songs that I listened to in 2014, not in any particular order.   (Although, the two artist that stood out the most to me are Milky Chance and Pell! ) The songs were not necessarily released in 2014, that's just when I discovered them.  Hope you enjoy!

Song

1) The Never (feat L.V. Baby)

2) Stolen Dance

3) Budapest

4) All of Me - Tiesto Birthday Treatment Remix -Radio Edit

5) Wine & Chocolates - andhim Remix Radio Version

6) Strange Powers

7) Psychic City (Classixx Remix)

8) Habits (Stay High) - Hippie Sabotage

9) Don't Wait

10) The River

11) Faded

12) Wake Me Up

13) Paper Aeroplane

14) Riptide

15) Mexico

16) Latch

17) Coriander

18) Down By the River

19) Mathematics

20) Tribe (feat. Jesse Boykins III)

21) Embrace The Martians

22) Let It Be

23) They Want My Spot

Artist

1) Pell

2) Milky Chance

3) George Ezra

4) John Legend

5) Theophilus London

6) The Magnetic Fields

7) YACHT

8) Trove Lo

9) Mapei

10) Son Little

11) Zhu

12) Avicii

13) Angus & Julia Stone

14) Vance Joy

15) Mexican Institute of Sounds

16) Disclosure, Sam Smith

17) Nancy Elizabeth

18) Milky Chance

19) Mos Def

20) Theophilus London

21) Crookers, Kid Cudi

22) Dyme Def

23) Jay Rock

Album

1) Single

2) Stolen Dance

3) Wanted On Voyage

4) All of Me (Tiesto Remix)

5) Wine & Chocolates andhim Remix Radio Version

6) Holiday

7) Future Disco Present; Poolside Sounds

8) Queen Of the Clouds

9) Don't Wait EP

10) The River

11) The Nightday - EP

12) TRUE

13) Home Grown Roots, Vol 1.

14) Dream Your Life Away

15) Politico

16) Settle

17) Battle and Victory

18) Stolen Dance

19) Black On Both Sides

20) Vibes

21) What Up Y'all

22) Space Music

23) From Hood Tales to the Cover of XXL