- Industry: Weather
- Number of terms: 60695
- Number of blossaries: 0
- Company Profile:
The American Meteorological Society promotes the development and dissemination of information and education on the atmospheric and related oceanic and hydrologic sciences and the advancement of their professional applications. Founded in 1919, AMS has a membership of more than 14,000 professionals, ...
Erosion increased by human agency to beyond the normal geologic rate.
Industry:Weather
1. The part of precipitation that does not become direct runoff. 2. The draining of water from a stream into another stream having a more rapid corroding action.
Industry:Weather
The fraction of incident radiation that is absorbed by matter. Absorptivity may be a function of wavelength and/or direction, and is related to the emissivity of the region by Kirchhoff's law. The absorptivity is identically equal to unity for blackbodies and is independent of wavelength for gray bodies.
Industry:Weather
The detailed dependence on wavelength of the intensity of radiation absorbed by a given medium. Absorption spectra of gases are typically composed of discrete spectral lines and bands of overlapping lines that depend on the molecular or atomic composition of the absorbing substance and that may be used to identify it uniquely. When measuring the absorption spectrum, the medium should be considerably colder than the source of incident radiation (which should also be continuous in wavelength), in order to clearly distinguish the absorption spectrum from the analogous emission spectrum.
Industry:Weather
The component of the total optical thickness that is due to absorption only.
Industry:Weather
The quantity of water that is lost during the initial filling of a reservoir because of absorption by soil and rocks.
Industry:Weather
A line of finite width in the absorption spectrum. Absorption lines are characterized by their central wavelength, line intensity, and line width.
Industry:Weather
A type of hygrometer that measures the water vapor content of the atmosphere by means of the absorption of vapor by a hygroscopic chemical. The amount of vapor absorbed may be determined in an absolute manner by weighing the hygroscopic material (see gravimetric hygrometry), or in a nonabsolute manner by measuring a physical property of the substance that varies with the amount of water vapor absorbed. The humidity strip, the carbon-film hygrometer element, and the thin-film capacitor are examples of the latter.
Industry:Weather
The area that, when multiplied by the irradiance of electromagnetic waves incident on an object, gives the radiant flux absorbed and dissipated by the object. Customary usage in radar describes the absorption cross section of an object as the area that, when multiplied by the power density of incident plane-wave radiation, gives the power absorbed and dissipated by the object. The extinction cross section of an object is the sum of the absorption cross section and the scattering cross section. For a medium consisting of a dispersion of absorbing objects through which radiation propagates, the volume absorption coefficient (units: m2m−3 or m−1) at a given location in the medium is the sum of the absorption cross sections of all the objects in a unit volume centered at that location.
Industry:Weather
