This has bugged me for like a decade but I hardly ever see barometers measure pressure outside of the range of 27-30. I even looked up how low it dropped during Hurricane Katrina because I knew that low pressures come with hurricanes. The lowest it dropped was something like 26.50.
It seems to me that there’s a whole huge part of the barometer just gathering dust. What kind of condition would it be if pressure was 0, for instance? Is that outer space or something? What about 15? Maybe the bottom of the ocean? I have no idea. So my question is, why bother having 0-25 on a standard barometer? It makes more sense to create a new scale from 25-30, and renumber it 0-100 or something like that. As it stands, 29.48 pressure vs 29.37 tells me absolutely nothing, and I feel nothing. But a difference of 18 (on my new scale) vs 84 would definitely make me aware of atmospheric pressure as a thing
And if someone can help me understand pressure, please tell me just exactly what kind of conditions will result in a pressure of 0, 10, and 20
30 is approximately standard atmospheric pressure at sea level, measured in inches of mercury. Blood pressure is measured in similar units, but those are millimeters of mercury, not inches.
0 inches of mercury would be space, with no air. The air pressure at the summit of Mt. Everest would be roughly 10 inches of mercury.
One inch of mercury (the units you’re talking about) is about 34 kPa. Normal atmospheric pressure at sea level is around 100 kilopascals, or 29.9 inches of mercury. A pressure of 26" Hg would be equivalent to 88.4 kPa, which is the normal air pressure at an elevation of ~3730 ft.
The air pressure is an expression of the weight of the atmosphere above you, so if the air pressure is reading zero, you’re somewhere with no atmosphere, and you’ve got bigger problems than an inefficient barometer. An atmospheric pressure of 20 inches of mercury is equivalent to around 10500 feet, which (IIRC) is what airplanes are pressurized to. The air pressure at the top of Mt. Everest (29029 ft) is a little under 10 inches of mercury
A inch of mercury is equal to 0.491 pounds per square inch, per Google. 0 inches of mercury would be a vacuum. 10 would be 4.91 PSI, or the air pressure at around 27,500 feet of elevation. 20 would be 9.82 PSI, or the air pressure at 10,500 feet, by the same chart.
The barometer, if anything doesn’t properly measure high pressure, given the highest barometric pressure recorded is 32.06 inches. In very cold, very dry places like Verkojansk, Russia, or parts of Antarctica, it’s not uncommon for the air pressure to remain over 30 inches for quite some time.
The thing is, those numbers refer to standard units (inches of mercury) so they do make sense. It’s like having a yardstick to measure sticks when every stick you can get your hands on ranges from 25-30" long. What you’re proposing is equivalent to erasing the marks on the yardstick, then putting a scale of 0-100 starting from what used to be 25" and ending at what used to 30" on it. I suspect you’ll find precious few folks who see that as much of an improvement. You can get a reasonable sense of higher vs. lower pressure situations from just seeing where the needle sits on a standard weather barometer which just shows the range from 28-31.
I feel compelled to point out that your numerical examples are not equivalent. Note that your proposed 18 vs. 84 comparison corresponds to 28½ vs. 30½, which is very noticeable on either scale, while 29.48 vs. 29.37 corresponds to 46 vs. 49 which is quite small on either scale.
I wonder if you can buy a barometer that shows a different range if you live somewhere at high altitude, say, Colorado. From the table Gray Ghost posted, it looks like the average barometric pressure in Denver should be around 25.
Mr. Neville has been to the telescopes on Mauna Kea at about 13,600 feet. That should have a pressure around 18.3. Mr. Neville said it was hard to think straight at that altitude (of course, the fact that he was totally thrown off his normal schedule by going on an observing run probably didn’t help with that).
The average pressure at the Dead Sea, the lowest elevation on Earth, is around 31.5 inches of mercury.
You don’t need to. A properly set up barometer is adjusted to show the sea-level pressure, wherever it is situated.
All weather reports and so on are based on sea-level pressure. (Unless you’re flying, in which case you’ll want to know the actual pressure at the air field.)
On days with very settled weather (typically a large and fairly stationary high-pressure system), TV weather forecasts sometimes mention that “it’s a good day to set your barometer”. If the sea-level pressure is, say, 1030mb (or 30.42 inches) over a wide area, you can adjust the dial on your barometer to that figure, regardless of how high you live. (IIRC the pressure falls by approximately 1mb for every 30ft of altitude, close to sea level.)
Huh? How’s that work? Warm air has a higher pressure than cold air, on account of the kinetic energy. High pressure systems bring warm weather, and when the day heats up, my airplane’s altimeter indicates lower alititude (i.e. reads higher pressure). A cold place would have very low pressure.
Actually, aviation weather reports also give the pressure at sea level. Sure, they read it at the field, but as you said, the barometer then reads the sea level pressure, and that’s the setting that goes into the METAR. If the field elevation is 240 ft, then the altimeter will read 240 when you land, not 0.
Cold dense air sinking creates high pressure, such as the archetypical example, the Siberian High. Here in the UK, while we don’t usually feel the effects of the Siberian high, pressure tends to be higher in winter than in summer. We regularly get 1040mb+ highs in winter, which are usually associated with cold, clear, frosty weather. The cold Scandinavian High is also fairly common, which brings cold easterly winds to Britain.
Here’s where it starts to get weird. Barometric pressure reported by weather services is ordinarily compensated for altitude. So for example, whereas the actual air pressure in Denver, Colorado is somewhere around 24.7 inches of mercury, Weather Underground is currently reporting it as 29.9 inches.
If you have a cheap barometer, it won’t allow for altitude compensation (though it will show temporal trends, which is what matters for weather forecasting).
In any event, the range isn’t that much lower; in Denver for example, the pressure will fluctuate around 24.7 inHg.
Uh, no. By that reasoning, the gas/plasma (I’ve heard it called both) inside a fluorescent tube would be at high pressures. Those are vacuum tubes… low pressure.
The pressure being measured is linked to density, not to kinetic energy. As Colophon explained, cold air is denser than hot air - this is why hot air rises, such as in balloons.
This is incorrect. The barometric setting in a standard Kollsman altimeter is also a sea-level compensated barometric pressure value, not the ground level static pressure.
There IS a difference in that someone at the airport will make the measurement by adjusting an altimeter to read the field’s known elevation, while the weather service will use a mercury manometer to directly measure the pressure and apply an altitude based correction. The altimeter applies a simple offset to the pressure, where the weather service uses a more sophisticated model, so you can end up with significantly different numbers especially at high altitude airports.
Are you assuming a fixed number of gas molecules in a sealed container of constant volume? That’s not a reasonable description of the atmosphere. Atmospheric pressure is literally the total weight of all of the air directly above a given area, so lower-density air will result in lower pressure.
Yeah, I was getting confused with, um, QFE? Is that the code for the uncorrected pressure at the airfield? IANAPilot, and you should be thankful for that.
It is the change in the reading which is used to forecast approaching weather, more than the absolute number on the device. A falling barometer foretells stormy weather, while a rising barometer indicates clearing, sunny days. Usually. YMMV.
I asked about this in my piloting thread from last year. According to the manuals, pressure goes up on hot days. As for a sealed container, here’s one response…
