Talk:Air pollution dispersion terminology/Draft

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I was the original sole author of this Wikipedia article

I copied it to here at Citizendium as is with the Wikipedia title ... and will now delete all of the Wikipedia links and certain sections. I will also be making some wording changes. - Milton Beychok 23:08, 25 January 2008 (CST)

Reason why this article may be difficult to understand

This article uses a great number of what may be strange words to readers unfamilar with air pollution dispersion. For example: Lagrangian, Eularian, Cartesian grid, Monin-Obukhov similarity, roughness length, Monin-Obukhov length, absorption, sedimentation, deposition velocity, inversion layers, radioactivity, radionuclides, etc. The infrastructure articles of the various workgroups in Citizendium simply have not yet included articles defining those words as has been done in Wikipedia.

Then there are even much simpler words which have not yet been defined in Citizendium. For example: United States Environmental Protection Agency (or U.S. EPA), United States Department of Energy, natural gas and liquified natural gas (LNG), furnace, flue gas, combustion, turbulence, etc.

If I were to put links ( [[Example]] ) around all such words in this article, it would be virtually a sea of red links ... so I have elected not to do so, but to wait until the Citizendiums infrastructure articles define most of them. If anyone disagree with my choice, please feel free to go through the article and put in red links to your heart's content.

In closing, if I were to browse articles about astrophysics or quantum physics, I would be quite mystified by their terminology. In other words, no one can know everything. It takes detailed study to understand highly technical subjects. - Milton Beychok 23:37, 26 January 2008 (CST)

As I attempt to get more caught up (looks to the skies for editors for other groups), I'm not sure I find this article that hard to understand, except in sufficiently circumscribed areas that I could say "OK, here I need to call in an expert". I've always been an active photographer, and, some years ago, wanted to go beyond the operational understanding of the techniques. So, I joined the Society for Photographic Engineering and Technology, and started reading up on why certain things, such as photosensitized materials and their chemistry, worked. Bought a couple of texts through the professional service, and got a lot more understanding. Then, I reached a little too far, and started reading about how dyes couple light energy to silver complexes. There was a page or so of equations, only interrupted by an apology that the next section would contain some drastic oversimplifications.

At that point, I muttered, OK, I see you are a Bessel function. Let's both back away from the table and no one will get hurt.

In this article, some of the terms you raise as specialized seem reasonably core statistical material; I couldn't necessarily derive them, but understand what they do. It may well be, that between some chemical warfare and other emergency work, I've picked up more atmospheric terminology than I thought. The one area where I started to glaze over seemed to be about fluid dynamics, which is an area where I mutter "laminar flow, turbulent flow, and...other stuff." You seem to have defined that area in terms of models that can be treated as black boxes, and I think I know the specialist I would need to look inside.

That, to me, is not hard-to-read material for someone reasonably literate in general science and engineering. Some of the dispersion concepts, at least superficially, come up in radio and radar propagation. So, I regard this as pretty good writing.

As a suggestion only, some of the terms such as line, point, etc., might lend themselves to graphics, but I'm willing to put it up for Approval now. If a physicist (I think) who knew more about fluid dynamics were to cross-check, I'd appreciate it, but I think it's in better shape than you suggest. Howard C. Berkowitz 03:38, 14 January 2009 (UTC)