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From: dietz@SLB-DOLL.CSNET (Paul Dietz)
Newsgroups: net.space
Subject: Re: Spacecraft emissions
Message-ID: <8601071745.AA14637@s1-b.arpa>
Date: Tue, 7-Jan-86 11:15:30 EST
Article-I.D.: s1-b.8601071745.AA14637
Posted: Tue Jan  7 11:15:30 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 8-Jan-86 06:19:23 EST
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Organization: The ARPA Internet
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>> Since the
>> scientific community has spent a huge amount of effort studying the
>> upper atmosphere and devising various models of chemical
>> transformations, the precise answer should be relatively easy to
>> obtain.  
>You have a lot more faith in those models and research than I do. The accuracy
>of weather prediction should give you an idea of how good such models really
>are - not very (maybe in a few decades ...).

Actually, atmospheric chemical models and weather forecasting are not
closely related.  Current chemical models have proven inaccurate
for this reason: there are thousands of chemical reactions going
on in the atmosphere at various rates, and not all are well understood.
In contrast, the physical processes in weather are reasonably well
understood, but lack of fine grained measurements cripples forecasting.

The January issue of Science 86 has an interesting article on new
weather forecasting tools, primarily new sensing technologies.  The most
interesting uses two polar-orbiting satellites with CO2-laser radar
to get global wind measurements.  Meteorologists think these satellites
alone will make 7-10 day forecasts as accurate as current 24-hour
forecasts.  Currently, wind measurements come from weather balloons.