To avoid the 0.5 hours spent hunting the internet, bookmark this website:
http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/index.html
I have mentioned it before, but it is the most exhaustive I have seen for
units SI and otherwise.
A sverdrup acording to this site is: "a unit of flow sometimes used in
oceanography to express the flow of ocean currents. One sverdrup equals one
million cubic meters per second, which is also one cubic hectometer per
second. The unit honors the Norwegian oceanographer and Arctic explorer H.
U. Sverdrup (1888-1957)."
Scott C
PS I have no formal association with this website.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of James R. Frysinger
> Sent: Tuesday, February 06, 2001 3:39 PM
> To: U.S. Metric Association
> Subject: [USMA:10881] Fwd: The North Atlantic Oscillation, units of
> measurement
>
>
> The following was sent to the editors of Science magazine, published by
> AAAS, and to the lead author of the subject article.
>
> Jim
>
> ---------- Forwarded Message ----------
> Subject: The North Atlantic Oscillation, units of measurement
> Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2001 17:56:44 -0500
> From: "James R. Frysinger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>
> Dear colleagues:
>
> I read the subject article by J. Hurrell, Y. Kushnir, and M. Visbeck
> with great interest since the NAO plays a large role in our weather
> patterns here in South Carolina.
>
> Unfortunately there is a bump in the road travelled by the authors'
> narrative. The article refers to a figure showing the correlation
> between THC and time. However, the THC axis is described in the text
> with the term "strength" and the units on the graph are sverdrups. With
> no additional effort or space, more information could have been passed
> to the reader by plotting the THC axis in terms of 10^6 m^3/s (or
> perhaps hm^3/s) and using the term "volumetric flow rate" in the text.
>
> The main reason that I subscribe to Science is that it provides me a
> quick view of the current work in other fields. Probably most of
> the readership for any particular article comes from outside the
> disciplines involved. (Specialists, of course, read the journals in
> their own fields.) A secondary reason for my subscription is that
> articles in Science often provide contemporary material for the
> classroom.
>
> Whether the reader is one who is reading out of his or her field or is a
> student who might be influenced by selection of a discipline,
> encountering esoteric and field-arcane units feels is like hitting a
> brick wall. Whenever any non-SI units are used care should be taken to
> define it in SI terms in the text, a footnote, a caption, or an
> endnote. Better yet, authors should avoid using non-SI units entirely.
>
> Using the internet, it took me 30 minutes to find a definition of the
> sverdrup, as compared to the 1 hour or so that I normally devote to
> reading each issue; a student wouldn't bother.
>
> regards,
> James R. Frysinger
>
> --
> James R. Frysinger University/College of Charleston
> 10 Captiva Row Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
> Charleston, SC 29407 66 George Street
> 843.225.0805 Charleston, SC 29424
> http://www.cofc.edu/~frysingj [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Cert. Adv. Metrication Specialist 843.953.7644
>
