Water Vapor

I have wanted a steam room in my house for a long time. Are there certain things you must do to ensure a home steam room will work well? Can you tell me exactly how to build a steam room so that I don't have any water or water-vapor issues? Will I need a special steam-room door, or will an ordinary shower door suffice? Your questions sure brought back a flood of memories from my childhood. When I was a kid, my friends and I would go swimming and play basketball at a traditional indoor health facility called the Friars Club.

Y ou can't even find your car on the street, the kids have been out of school for days, and "blizzard conditions" is now standard weatherman talk in the D.C.-Baltimore region. So if global warming is happening, why in the world are we literally buried in snow? It's a good question, and thankfully, the answer is pretty straightforward. In fact, the growing pattern of extreme snowfall in our region has the fingerprints of climate change all over it - even as temperatures steadily rise across America and the world.

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. - A method of protecting the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence may have posed the biggest danger to the historic documents, NASA Langley researchers say. A NASA Langley-led research team that has been studying the problem since 1998 has found that conditions inside the encasements holding those documents was key in their potential deterioration. The chief problem, the researchers found, was that there was twice as much water vapor as there should have been.

Stuart Godwin Jr. wrote from Chestertown a while back to ask: "What is the relationship between Dew Point and Relative Humidity? Is one dependent on the other?" You bet. Warmer air can hold more water vapor. The RH is a percentage, telling us how close to saturation (100 percent) the air is at ground level. As air cools, it can hold less moisture, and RH rises. At the dew-point temperature, it's saturated (100 percent), and the vapor condenses as rain or fog.

C. Ben Bates of Joppa writes to ask how the presence of water vapor in the atmosphere relates to the boiling point of water, where liquid water becomes a gas. "It is hard to imagine that liquid water is `boiling' up there in the clouds," he says. It's not, of course. Water vapor is the gaseous phase of water, but no boiling is necessary to produce it. Water vapor can and does enter the atmosphere directly, from "evaporation" (liquid to gas) or "sublimation" (ice to gas).

Stuart Godwin Jr. wrote from Chestertown a while back to ask: "What is the relationship between Dew Point and Relative Humidity? Is one dependent on the other?" You bet. Warmer air can hold more water vapor. The RH is a percentage, telling us how close to saturation (100 percent) the air is at ground level. As air cools, it can hold less moisture, and RH rises. At the dew-point temperature, it's saturated (100 percent), and the vapor condenses as rain or fog.

The water that gushes from your taps might have been created billions of years ago during the birth of a new star.A team of scientists using the European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory reports that it has detected just such a water factory in a gas cloud 1,500 light years from Earth in the Orion Nebula.The vast cloud is producing so much water vapor that, condensed into liquid form, it could fill the Earth's oceans every 24 minutes, said David Neufeld, a member of the team and a professor of physics and astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University.

I recently looked at a house that has a brick chimney with mineral deposits on its exterior, apparently the result of moisture condensation inside the chimney. This problem is not uncommon, and may become increasingly common as older furnaces are replaced by newer, more efficient ones. The chimney on the house runs up the two-story end wall. The mineral deposits, which are white and powdery, are at the bottom third of the chimney exterior. Mineral deposits like this are typically the result of water inside the chimney leaching minerals out of the mortar used in the construction of the chimney.

Q: I'm a little worried that our older refrigerator may be leaking CFCs. Is there a way to be sure without calling a repairman?A: Yes. Have a columnist call a repair person for you. Here's what my repair person said: The CFCs that are the coolant in your refrigerator are in a sealed, pressurized system. These rarely leak. When they do, however, you know it because your refrigerator stops cooling pretty quickly, and your freezer will defrost.If this has happened, you will have to call a repair person in to fix the system.

Like snowflakes settling on the windshield, thousands of loosely packed snowballs the size of small houses are pelting Earth's upper atmosphere every day and sending tons of water vapor drifting toward the oceans, according to scientists from the University of Iowa.As many as 20 of these comet-like objects break up over Earth every minute, said space physicist Louis A. Frank, who presented photographs of the 10- to 20-ton objects streaking toward Earth.If they have been falling since the formation of the solar system, he said, the snowballs could explain how Earth's oceans were formed.

I have wanted a steam room in my house for a long time. Are there certain things you must do to ensure a home steam room will work well? Can you tell me exactly how to build a steam room so that I don't have any water or water-vapor issues? Will I need a special steam-room door, or will an ordinary shower door suffice? Your questions sure brought back a flood of memories from my childhood. When I was a kid, my friends and I would go swimming and play basketball at a traditional indoor health facility called the Friars Club.

Thursday's bitter early-morning cold triggered rare forecasts for "freezing fog" in Western Maryland. "What in the world is that?" one puzzled Ruxton reader asked. Plain old fog occurs when rising humidity reaches 100 percent, and water vapor in the air condenses into fine droplets - a cloud at ground level. With nothing to freeze onto, those droplets will stay liquid down to 14 degrees. But when they touch a surface at that temperature, they form beautiful, feathery ice crystals called "rime."

I recently looked at a house that has a brick chimney with mineral deposits on its exterior, apparently the result of moisture condensation inside the chimney. This problem is not uncommon, and may become increasingly common as older furnaces are replaced by newer, more efficient ones. The chimney on the house runs up the two-story end wall. The mineral deposits, which are white and powdery, are at the bottom third of the chimney exterior. Mineral deposits like this are typically the result of water inside the chimney leaching minerals out of the mortar used in the construction of the chimney.

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. - A method of protecting the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence may have posed the biggest danger to the historic documents, NASA Langley researchers say. A NASA Langley-led research team that has been studying the problem since 1998 has found that conditions inside the encasements holding those documents was key in their potential deterioration. The chief problem, the researchers found, was that there was twice as much water vapor as there should have been.

The water that gushes from your taps might have been created billions of years ago during the birth of a new star.A team of scientists using the European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory reports that it has detected just such a water factory in a gas cloud 1,500 light years from Earth in the Orion Nebula.The vast cloud is producing so much water vapor that, condensed into liquid form, it could fill the Earth's oceans every 24 minutes, said David Neufeld, a member of the team and a professor of physics and astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University.

Like snowflakes settling on the windshield, thousands of loosely packed snowballs the size of small houses are pelting Earth's upper atmosphere every day and sending tons of water vapor drifting toward the oceans, according to scientists from the University of Iowa.As many as 20 of these comet-like objects break up over Earth every minute, said space physicist Louis A. Frank, who presented photographs of the 10- to 20-ton objects streaking toward Earth.If they have been falling since the formation of the solar system, he said, the snowballs could explain how Earth's oceans were formed.