this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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All weather is a result of heat exchange and pressure differentials caused by an unequally heated atmosphere. (The side toward the sun is warmer.)
For mere mortals: various exposed land masses gets heated by sunlight, and the air in contact with that land gets heated too.
When air gets warmer it expands (because atoms move and collide faster). That makes it less dense, so colder and denser air (with its slower atoms) falls in under the warm air and pushes the warm air up. If the ground is still warmer then that cold air gets heated too.
When that happens just at one point it makes air move around that warm ground in a "donut shape", up in the center and out and down and back in.
When that happens at many different locations then those air movements collide with each other, and now we have complicated weather which takes big supercomputers to simulate.