Talk:Hypsometric equation

$p_{1}$ and $p_{2}$ are confusing

Since $p_{1}=p(z_{2})$ and $p_{2}=p(z_{1})$. Shouldn't these be swapped? Hertzsprung (talk) 12:25, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Just the equation?

I know this will upset people who "do math" but for those of us who *don't* it's sometimes useful just list a simple(r) equation. I'm programming some stuff in C and I really needed hand-holding with the math laid out as a formula.

Here's my final code - with all of the constants plugged in derived from some googling. 1013.25 is the standard pressure at sea level. The code (which not complete) requires just the temperature and measured barometric pressure in hPa to derive a *rough* altitude.

height = ((pow(1013.25/pressure, (1 / 5.257)) - 1) * (temperature + 273.15)) / 0.0065;

Presumably, as pressure ASL alters, it's necessary to plug that into the formula - but really, I wish that you maths folk would give the rest of us a chance with symbols that we can follow or a step-by-step worked example that doesn't rely on esoteric variable names and symbols - something that a basic scientific calculator could manage would be ideal. Smidoid (talk) 18:54, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Equation units don’t match

In the main equation, there is a missing quantity with units of mass. I don't know what is wrong, but it does not appear to be a typo as it is also present in the dp equation used in the first derivation presented in the article. The left hand side, dp, presumably has units of pressure such as Pascals. The right hand side, however, has units of mass density times energy, or mass times energy density, such as kg*(Joules/m^3).

The issue does not strike me as purely semantic as I am genuinely ignorant of the physics and unable to understand what the mass term is. A simple line saying it is, for example, the mass of the dominant molecular species like N2 (≈28 amu) as appears in the scale height equation $p(z)\propto e^{-(m_0 g)/(k_B T)}$ as $m_0$ would be very helpful. Thanks in advance to whoever adds the missing detail. -Parthi S, a career exergy conservationist (talk) 18:18, 2 September 2023 (UTC)