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Sea breeze - magnitude of horizontal pressure gradient?

What is the range of horizontal pressure gradients typically caused by the differential heating of land and water under sea breeze conditions?
BHF
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Why are salt domes suitable for the final disposal of nuclear waste?

I keep reading that final storage sites for nuclear waste are being built in salt domes. In the case of the German Gorleben project, the salt domes were determined to be unsuitable after prolonged investigation. Regardless of the Gorleben case, why…
Weiss
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What exactly is wind velocity

How exactly do we define wind velocity? Obviously, I suppose this is something like "speed of displacement of a quantity of air", but this seems to be too imprecise. For example, a cup anemometer measures this velocity, but any anemometer depends on…
Greg82
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How many joules are required to mine a unit of coal?

Coal is still a major source of energy for generation of electricity. So how much energy is used to extract a unit (tonne/kilogram etc) of coal? And thus what is the efficiency of coal as a source of energy?
Cycling Engineer
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Is the cause of Old Faithful's bimodal distribution for eruption times straightforward?

From wikipedia: With a margin of error of 10 minutes, Old Faithful will erupt 65 minutes after an eruption lasting less than 2.5 minutes or 91 minutes after an eruption lasting more than 2.5 minutes. The reliability of Old Faithful can be…
jonsca
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How plausible is it that "a portion of the ocean's floor" could suddenly be "thrown up to the surface" as described in this Lovecraft story?

This question came to me after reading H.P. Lovecraft's "Dagon"- the protagonist has fallen asleep drifting on the ocean in a small boat. He wakes up one morning to discover he's been grounded on what appears to be a vast region of mire that used to…
Mantha
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How can you explain this storm phenomenon?

It's been a while since this happened, so I don't have many details. About 3 years ago, we had a popup storm here in Louisville. It was completely unexpected and unpredicted. That's not the strange part though. I took at look at the radar (it was…
Jerry Dodge
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Is there such a thing as a "basalt dike"?

I've always understood that basalt is an extrusive rock (formed by eruption), and dikes are intrusions (no eruption), so I would have thought that a dike could not be composed of basalt rock. It's come to my attention that many people talk about…
foobarbecue
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Are there significant amounts of rare earth elements on Iceland?

The rare earth elements form in magmatic rocks. The Iceland is very active vulcanic region, and it's, to my knowledge, entirely build from magmatic rocks. So it wouldn't be surprising if there were large amount of rare earth elements there? Are such…
Danubian Sailor
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What does groundwater consist of?

I heard that groundwater is rich in minerals and fluorides, but I have no clear thoughts on what else it contains and whether the ground water differs from area to area. Can someone please shed some light about what groundwater actually consists of?…
Mr_Green
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Interpolating spatial data in contiguous sea areas only

I have a dataset consisting of irregularly spaced points in the ocean. For each point I have coordinates and a data value. I need to interpolate to a regular grid. So far, so easy. There are areas of land within the area covered by the dataset, and…
Semidiurnal Simon
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Have there been any studies on how vehicles directly contribute to a rising global temperature?

I've tried searching for this myself, but Google is saturated with the Greenhouse Gases angle of Rising Global Temperatures. What I'm interested in is the following: Greenhouse gases aside, to what extent do automobiles directly contribute to a…
Aww_Geez
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Why do Volcanoes give out so much Sulphur Dioxide and Carbon Dioxide?

From my understanding, the mantle is in a highly reduced state, so I can't understand why a volcano would give off a highly oxidised gas such as sulphur dioxide. Carbon dioxide is too an oxidised gas which is emitted by volcanoes, however I justify…
AlexLipp
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Are there some places near the equator that are hottest in their winter and some that are hottest in their summer? Is there a map of this?

Under this answer there's a comment: I am not aware of any location having its hottest temperature in winter... and for mid-to-polar latitude folks specifically we first learn that our summer is the hottest and as we get older we learn that half…
uhoh
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Do wind predictions have confidence scores?

I’m a sailing captain in training and my community members asked about confidence in wind predictions. They were unhappy with the large variation between different wind predictions. The speed and directions from different sources were at times in…
brianray
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