The relatable atmosphere

One reason I like atmospheres is that things tend to happen on human timescales.  Temperatures and clouds change with the hour. The (Dutch) weather can be different from one day to the next. The weather goes through its yearly cycle and one year is slightly different from the other. Even extreme events will happen several times in a lifetime somewhere on Earth. For me, that constant change pushes a similar kind of button in my brain as the constant flow of news and social media posts. My name is Remco and I am an information addict.

In a field like geology, seeing things change is generally more difficult. Moving through time means moving through space: you have to dig deeper or look elsewhere to puzzle together what has happened, like a detective investigating a crime scene. Even then, the changes you see generally occur over many years. Looking into the future is also quite hard in geology. You cannot speed everything up to have a sneaky peak. Computer models can, but they are uncertain and you cannot stand on a digital Earth. Seeing things change in the atmosphere, on the other hand, can just be a matter of sitting on the sofa with a nice cup of tea.

Astronomy has a different trick up its sleeves. The universe is so enormous, and has so many things in it, that you can start to use statistics. For relatively well-behaved things, such as the Sun, we can find a very close copy of it somewhere else. If this other star was formed just a little bit earlier, it is just like seeing a future version of the Sun. From studying many similar stars of different ages, we know the past and future of the Sun pretty well. But we will never see the Sun change much in our lifetimes. Even if we find a star that is very close to exploding, there is a good change you have to wait a few thousand years to see it go. That's a long tea break.

Another thing I like about many atmospheric processes is that the scale at which things happen are somewhat relatable. OK, they can be at a planet-sized scale, but often you can see many relevant things happen when you just look outside, or take a photograph from space. The atmosphere is closer to us scale to than stars or molecules, let alone galaxies and electrons.

I think all these things make me relate more to atmospheres than many other possible subjects of study. Apparently, I like things that are weird, but not too unimaginable. Slightly offbeat, but nothing too outlandish. A bit like myself, really.