Comments on: Puddles

By: Gorospe Smith

Gorospe Smith — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 18:12:14 +0000

As an Oklahoman (Tulsa) I have to say this data is pretty fascinating. You must love your work. Good job!

By: Vinh Nguyen

Vinh Nguyen — Sat, 08 Feb 2014 11:50:27 +0000

This is terribly fascinating and your experiments look fun. Puddles area unit transient and, if giant enough, ought to be accounted for as you recommend

By: peggy

peggy — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 19:29:19 +0000

I think it would be great to study that lake! Puddle temperature is a strong function of puddle size — something I didn’t talk about in the blog. I measured several puddles one sunny day after it rained, and the smaller puddles were warming up faster than the big ones, and the irrigation ditch, which was getting water from the lake, was much cooler.

Thanks, and good luck!

By: grossman

grossman — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 21:53:50 +0000

Hi Peggy, This is very interesting and your experiments look fun. Puddles are transient and, if large enough, should be accounted for as you suggest. However, I think ‘permanent’ but widely spaced moisture sources are more important, as we have discussed, and chief among them are lakes and riparian zones. We have that lake study from CASES 97 that never got analyzed. Maybe acceptance of my NASA proposal will allow a first look at riparian zones from historical aircraft data.

Keep up the good work. This is definitely ‘shade-tree’ science at its best.

Your old buddy, Bob Grossman

By: peggy

peggy — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:21:05 +0000

Hi, Linus!

This is a great idea. Even if I had measured the depth, since the puddle shape was so complex.

One problem — the chalk I used to outline the puddle wore off quickly. So I either need to …

1. Create an artificial puddle of a simple shape, or
2. Use something that stays around a little bit longer (but not too long, since puddles tend to form int he same place again and again).

Thanks for your comment!

Peggy

By: Linus

Linus — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 01:28:54 +0000

Hello, Dr. Lemone. Interesting study being discussed here. I don\’t have any sort of expertise in this area at and all and any comment I make is only the speculation of a layman in this very complex field.

It seems that the puddle made it\’s biggest retreat from 10:45AM – 11:15AM. It might be useful to measure the volume of the puddle by bringing some containers of water and seeing how much water has to be poured into them in order to fill up the puddle, and then try to estimate the volume of the water (Y-axis) and how much of it continually evaporates as time passes (the x-axis). Perhaps then, maybe it could be discerned if the puddle is disappearing at a continuous rate or at an accelerate rate at some point, and what other event coincides with a faster acceleration rate.

Linus