Fort Towson

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I removed the expert needed tag after I made some quick minor corrections to this section. Everything is in good order now. Theonlysilentbob (talk) 02:41, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Instability is when the airmass on the surface is significantly warmer than air aloft. Instability could be very warm air on the ground that becomes buoyant or cold air aloft making air on the ground buoyant. This usually creates vertically developed clouds from convection, due to the rising motion, which can eventually lead to thunderstorms. It could also be created in other phenomenon, such as a cold front. Even though the air is cooler on the surface, there is still warmer air in the mid-levels, that can rise into the upper-levels. However, if there is not enough water vapor present, there is no ability for condensation, thus storms, clouds, and rain will not form.

weather.com - Glossary

This was a content fork of Convective available potential energy. Any additional information belongs there. If this page is edited again, I will revert and request full protection of it. -- IRP ☎ 20:04, 23 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Lots of people are not looking for a technical physics discussion of the phenomenon. If consensus dictates that there only be one place to get information, and that information be abstruse and not useful to a casual reader who probably is looking for a meteorological phenomenon, not the physics behind it, I will abide—but your say-so is not consensus. Bongomatic 23:09, 23 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

After what another editor described as an "unopposed" merger discussion (but one that occurred entirely with merger tags and without comment on either article's talk page or at Wikipedia:Proposed mergers), content from this article ("Convective instability) was previously merged into Convective available potential energy, an article that (properly, no doubt) has an integral punctuating its second paragraph—an article in WikiProject Physics.

After that merger was complete, I created this article (pretty much from scratch / the Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge), with a link to the more general and detailed article up front. The idea that a content fork is inappropriate for wholly different levels of technical sophistication is risible. Any interested editors are requested to opine here as to whether this article should be kept separately from CAPE. Bongomatic 23:21, 23 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I am not an expert on hydrodynamic instability, but know something about it and have quite a broad knowledge of fluid dynamics. From what I know, and after some googling and consulting "Hydrodynamic stability" of Drazin & Reid:

Convective instability is a phenomenon in all kinds of fluid and plasma flows, so including meteorology, oceanography, astrophysics and plasma physics. The instability may already occur without buoyancy effects. The adjective "convective" primarily refers to the fact that the instability is convected with the group velocity (or flow velocity), see [1], and refers not primarily to convection due to buoyancy effects.

Convective available potential energy (CAPE) is an indicator of convective instability in stratified media, by buoyancy, valid under certain conditions.

So in general, if there should be a merger at all, CAPE should be merged into Convective instability, to my opinion. But I oppose a merger, since CAPE is a well-developed and reasonable referenced article on this more specific topic.

This (well readable) article, convective instability, claims to treat the subject as a topic within the science of meteorology, but is based on (and only refers to) a chapter from a pilot's handbook. Which is a start, but unsatisfactory from an encyclopedic point of view: articles on scientific subjects should be primarily based on reliable scientific sources. And may, if necessary, also contain sections with equations and integrals, besides a readable and correct introduction and overview. Further, personally, I am not happy that there is no general article on convective instability, covering the full scope of the phenomenon and not only the instability by stratification. -- Crowsnest (talk) 09:25, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

From what I gather, this notion of convective instability has nothing to do with the concept of convective instability in stability theory. Putting in hatnote to Convective instability (stability theory), which is at present a red link, but I shall write something there shortly. --jftsang 22:29, 15 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]