- Industry: Earth science
- Number of terms: 10770
- Number of blossaries: 1
- Company Profile:
The UK charity dedicated to the protection of the marine environment and its wildlife.
An imaginary circle drawn on the Earth's surface that has its center synchronize to the center of the planet. The equator is a great circle.
Industry:Earth science
A large floating block of freshwater ice that has broken off the edge of a glacier and been carried out to sea; about 90% of its mass lies under the water.
Industry:Earth science
A unit of length used in sea and air navigation, based on the length of one minute of latitude at the Equator. It is approximately 1/8th longer than the statute mile.
Industry:Earth science
A narrow deposit of sand and/or gravel found across the mouth of a bay.
Industry:Earth science
1. The transition region between the turbulent surface layer and the normally nonturbulent free atmosphere. This region is about 1 km thick and is characterized by a well-developed mixing generated by frictional drag as the air masses move over Earth's surface. This layer contains approximately 10% of the mass of the atmosphere. Also called the "atmospheric boundary layer" or "frictional layer. "
2. That layer of the atmosphere from a planet's surface to the geostrophic wind level including, therefore, the surface boundary layer and the Ekman layer. Above this layer lies the free atmosphere. Also called friction layer, atmospheric boundary layer.
Industry:Earth science
A five-channel scanning instrument that quantitatively measures electromagnetic radiation, flown on NOAA environmental satellites. AVHRR remotely determines cloud cover and surface temperature. Visible and infrared detectors observe vegetation, clouds, lakes, shorelines, snow, and ice.
Industry:Earth science
A materially conserved quantity in adiabatic, frictionless flow that accounts for changes of vorticity due to vortex line stretching and Coriolis effects. In the shallow water approximation, the potential vorticity is q=(f+\zeta)/(H+\eta), in which f is the Coriolis parameter, \zeta is the relative vorticity, H is the mean fluid depth, and \eta is the surface elevation above the mean.
Industry:Earth science
A land area where precipitation runs off into streams, rivers, lakes, and reservoirs. It is a land feature that can be identified by tracing a line along the highest elevations between two areas on a map, often a ridge. Large drainage basins, like the area that drains into the River Severn contain thousands of smaller drainage basins.
Industry:Earth science
An apparent force arising from the fact that Earth turns on its axis. It is an apparent force that makes sense only because Earth is a noninertial frame of reference. Earth's spinning creates a constant centrifugal acceleration in which objects appear to curve because Earth is spherical, with different points on the surface spinning at different speeds. If, instead of being a spherical, rotating planet, Earth were flat, there would be no Coriolis force because all points would spin at the same speed.
Industry:Earth science
A long and narrow beach of sand and/or gravel that runs parallel to the coastline and is not submerged by the tide.
Industry:Earth science
