Talk:Adiabatic lapse

Renaming of page

I think this is a dumb name for the page. We usually talk about "adiabatic lapse rate" and "lapse rate" alone or with other adjectives. You have left out the normal noun in this phrase, leaving two adjectives. Gene Nygaard 13:59, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

This was the most substantive article out of a group of related stubs. I merged all of the stubs into this one. User:Smack seems to have chosen the name. Perhaps we should move to Adiabatic cooling? That makes more sense to me. -- hike395 14:16, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

What were the names of the various stubs? It could be cooling or heating, couldn't it, depending on which direction you go? And, it is the heating which is given the positive value.

It just seems to me that the connection is backwards. My dictionary has an entry for "lapse rate", and I always look at "adiabatic" as modifying that phrase. Gene Nygaard 14:31, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thought about this some more. We want a name for the state of (approximate) adiabatic equilibrium of the atmosphere. Adiabatic cooling and adiabatic heating are verbs that don't reflect that equilibrium. That's no good, as you point out. "lapse" itself can be a verb or a noun, so "adiabatic lapse" does make sense as a noun. The problem is it's non-standard. It's quite rare on the web (seems like only Eric Weisstein uses it). As you point out, it's always expressed as "adiabatic lapse rate".

I merged adiabatic lapse rate, lapse rate, temperature lapse rate, atmospheric adiabatic cooling, and absolute stable air into this article, and fixed lots of double redirects.

I think moving this back to adiabatic lapse rate is probably the best strategy. This article was split out from there by User:Smack --- it probably makes sense to merge it back in. I'll do so. -- hike395 16:31, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)