"lionslair at consolidated dot net" "lionslair at consolidated dot net"
wrote in message ...
Ed Huntress wrote:
"Offbreed" wrote in message
...

Todd Rich wrote:

Average hurricane 5000 megatons PER DAY!!!

Sorry to jump in, I thought the hurricane statisic was a good one to

add.

An excellent one. Two days equals all the nukes in the world.


Actually, not, except in terms of total heat produced. The energy in a
hurricane is so dispersed in both time and space that there is little
comparison with the consequences of a nuclear explosion.

The 5000 megaton-per-day figure seems to have acquired a pass-along
status;
it's interesting that hurricane experts at the University of California
say
that the total accumulated energy acquired by a typical Atlantic
hurricane
is 1/5 of that amount, and that its energy is released over the entire
path
of the hurricane, over the course of days.

Regardless, the key point is to be careful about getting worked up over
these comparisons. If you dispersed the energy of a bomb over tens of
thousands of square miles, and stretched the time domain from
milliseconds
to days, you'd have something useful to think about. If not, not.

--
Ed Huntress


Ed -
I think that is the mis-concept for you. Time domain isn't it. Energy
is.
Take both and divide them along the way.

I'm afraid I don't follow that at all. What I meant by "time domain" is the
term as it's used in graphing dimensions. You plot the energy released
(Y-axis) against time (X-axis), and you get a graph of the *rate* of energy
release. If you plot surface area on X against energy on Y, you get a graph
of the *geometrical dispersion* of energy. That's how I was using those
terms.


I don't think people really understand the energy in 5000 Megatons - I
believe
bad science generated it.

I doubt if it's bad science. It sounds like it might be an extreme case or
an exaggeration, based on other figures I saw when I checked it out. The
funny thing is that the 5,000 megaton figure shows up all over Google --
with no attribution or cited references.

In any case, it's just a small part of the energy that the Earth receives
from the sun each day, if all you want to see is impressive energy figures.

--
Ed Huntress