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Is it necessary to learn climate engineering techniques beyond aerosol injection? For example, space sunshades and marine cloud brightening.

biz11 wrote:Is it necessary to learn climate engineering techniques beyond aerosol injection? For example, space sunshades and marine cloud brightening.

I don't think that's referenced in the rules much so while it could be useful to understand, I don't see it coming up very much.

How much in depth radar altimetry do you think there'll be?

There's not too much to radar altimetry, as far as most of the tests I've seen are concerned. Nothing too complicated in bouncing radar beams off of perpendicular surfaces to range objects. It's pretty similar to lidar and sonar in that respect. If you wanted to discuss what happens to a radar beam as it passes through the atmosphere, interacts and reflects off a medium, and pass through the atmosphere again, that can start to get tricky, but most of the math stuff would be college-level and not expected on a test. It's all about principle.

alchzh wrote:How much in depth radar altimetry do you think there'll be?

I would assume you would have to know the fundamental concepts behind depth radar altimetry. There shouldn't be any very advanced mathematics concerning depth radar altimetry.

If I'm not mistaken, radar altimetry basically refers to using radar to find the height away from the surface? And is especially used to to find the height range from the satellite to the sea AND find the height of the sea surface?

geniusjohn5 wrote:If I'm not mistaken, radar altimetry basically refers to using radar to find the height away from the surface? And is especially used to to find the height range from the satellite to the sea AND find the height of the sea surface?

Radar altimetry is used to determine the ranges, and therefore the height of the sea surface. Sea surface height can also be used to indirectly measure ocean bottom bathymetry.

The most common altimetry problems I remember were being given a time in seconds for a signal from a satellite to reach Earth and return to the satellite (as well as the satellite's orbital distance), and having to calculate the elevation of a topographic feature from this information. If you understand how altimetry works (and you know the speed of light), you should be able to do this, I don't see it asking you for much more beyond that.

I'm looking at multiple sources for the Planck function, and they all have very different formulations of the equation. I'm also having trouble understanding the concept of Planck's law. Can anybody help me out, or at least point me to a reliable source with good information about Planck's function/law?

Sleepy wrote:I'm looking at multiple sources for the Planck function, and they all have very different formulations of the equation. I'm also having trouble understanding the concept of Planck's law. Can anybody help me out, or at least point me to a reliable source with good information about Planck's function/law?

It's a two-variable function. The different forms probably have to do with different variables being used. The one I have on my notes gives the spectral radiance, when I feed the temperature and the wavelength into it. Basically, those blackbody curves you see on Google Images? Those are just graphs of this function, when the temperature is held constant. So long as you understand the concept of blackbodies - what they are, what happens when you shift the temperature, etc, that's all there is to it for Planck's Law.