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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
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To: Kevin Rose who wrote (735533)4/5/2006 9:14:04 PM
From: ManyMoose  Read Replies (1) of 769670
 
Have you ever heard of a cold sink?

I'm not joking. It's a concept related to the heat sink but works by convection instead of radiation like a heat sink.

Cold sinks were a serious problem for me when I was trying to get tree plantations established in Oregon. A cold sink (we called them frost pockets) is a geomorphological feature like a bench or small depression in the surface of the ground that would resemble a bowl or dish. I've seen large ones and small ones.

One was such an effective cold sink that it had been planted ten times before I got there and still had no trees. Frost had killed them all.

I stopped planting it and used it as a perfect example of a cold sink or frost pocket for field trips and demonstrations.

Cold air is denser and heavier than warm air, so when the atmosphere is stable it tends to flow downhill until it gets to an impediment like the foot of a mountain. It stalls at benches and bowl-shaped depressions. If the young trees are trying to put out new buds, the frost stays on them like glue and kills the new tissue, and ultimately the tree. In my perfect example, once cold air had flowed into the bowl-shaped depression there was no way for it to get out. It just stayed there until the ambient temperature let it warm by radiation.
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