Author Archives: gymnosperm

This series is getting long, but there is one more avenue to explore before it can be finished. We left off with the kissing conundrum that was not completely resolved. That’s ok. We may not resolve this problem either. The kissing … Continue reading →

  We left off the last post with the puzzlement that Modtran looking up and down from the same altitude sees CO2 deviation from the blackbody spectrum, evidence of CO2 absorption and radiance, that matches almost exactly in intensity. This is illustrated … Continue reading →

Time to make good on the promise to progress upwards. In the first post in this series we established that Modtran sees no significant deviation from the blackbody spectrum looking down in the CO2 bands until about one kilometer altitude. Looking … Continue reading →

Further delaying a repeated promise to progress upwards in prior posts in this series, it seems important to address an obvious question: why, when you look up and down from say 10 meters, can you see deviations from the blackbody spectrum … Continue reading →

According to the US Energy Information Administration (which heretofore I never knew existed) when you burn a typical E10 gallon of gasoline in your car, it produces about 18.95 pounds of CO2. Really? A gallon of gasoline only weighs 6 pounds. Part … Continue reading →

Delaying a promise to progress upward in the first post in this series, further work has shown that we need to go sideways a bit. It turns out that according to MODTRAN, like CO2, water does not radiate in the lower troposphere … Continue reading →

We have explored up and down looking spectrometers in prior posts. In all cases the up looking instruments have been on the ground. A fun thing about the Modtran program is that you can look both up and down from any … Continue reading →