Originally Posted by
Hellsfish
OK let me try to explain why I am confused. Take 2 columns of air, lets say 100,000ft high.
One is warm and one is cold. At a point 5,000 foot from the surface, one column has 95,000 feet of cold, dense and heavy air above it and the other has 95,000 feet of warm, less dense and lighter air above it. At this 5000 foot point, the pressure will be higher in the cold air. The point at which the same amount of warm air would produce the same pressure must be lower right?? Where am I going wrong??
Firstly in your fixed column height example your ground level pressures wouldn't be the same ( h times rho times g etc, where g and h are fixed but rho varies with temperature), so your 5000 foot comparison isn't valid.
Even so stick with the basics of your model because it might help, keeping the top i.e . Zero pressure level of your cold column at 100,000 feet but allowing the top of the hot one to move. If we now actually magically ensure that ground level pressure
is the same under the two columns and we know (by definition) that the cold column tops out at zero pressure at 100,000 feet, how high up relatively, will the top (zero pressure level) of the hot column be?