Saturday, May 30, 2009

Meteorology and the National Spelling Bee?

I was watching the 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee, this afternoon on ESPN 2 and although I used to be an English major, many of the words that they used during the spelling bee for the young students, I was not familiar with. Many of the words used were interesting but one word in particular caught my attention- AUSTAUSCH. The language of origin is German and as the announcer described the definition of the word, I was surprised that the word was related to meteorology. I’ll be entering my senior year of college next Fall and so far I have not encountered this word, however it will definitely be a word that I’ll add to my ever-growing vocabulary.
From the Encyclopedia Britannia website:
Austaush coefficient
physics also called exchange coefficient, eddy coefficient, or eddy diffusivity
in fluid dynamics, particularly in its applications to meteorology and oceanography, the proportionality between the rate of transport of a component of a turbulent fluid and the rate of change of density of the component. In this context, the term component signifies not only material constituents of the fluid, such as dissolved or suspended substances, but also constituents of its energy, such as heat and momentum.
source

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