Re: Cloudworld

Robert Grumbine (bobg@xxxxxxxxx) writes:
In article <f8d8m3$hn8$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
John Park <af250@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
John Park (af250@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) writes:
[...]
(But are there solid CO2 clouds on Venus? I suspect the
temperature/pressure combinations for CO2 clouds may be a bit tricky to
satisfy, though I'd have to look into it.)

It seems that Venus' atmosphere never gets cold enough to form CO2
clouds. But then neither does Earth's. Carbon dioxide sublimes at -78.5 C
at one atmosphere. Our troposhere gets down to about minus fifty, the
stratosphere to a bit above minus sixty, and then it gets warmer with
increasing altitude.

Vostok at the surface (fair elevation) has recorded at least -70 C.
-80 and colder does occur in the Antarctic atmosphere, being involved
in ozone hole chemistry. (There's a critical point around 190 K for
the destruction to take off.) Oddly, the next most likely place for
such low temperatures is the tropics -- near the tropopause.

Intersting.

What keeps the CO2 from snowing out, or at least down, isn't the
lack of points that reach the critical temperature, but the lack of
CO2 vapor pressure.

Asking whether solid CO2 could exist in the standard atmosphere seemed
enough for a first cut at the problem. Yes, if the partial pressure of CO2
were three orders of magnitude higher, the current temperatures would have
a chance of producing CO2 snow--but with that much CO2 in the air, what
would the temperature profile look like?

--John Park
.

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