Really? Oily rain is impossible? My cooking says that's inaccurate.

[Better Today]

I just had a chance to watch Rachel's show where indicates that NOAA says oily rain is impossible. As much as I agree that the video showing the "results" of oily rain from youtube is probably just street oil being lifted, I have to disagree with the impossibility of oily rain.

No, I'm not an oceanographer or a meteorologist, but I do cook. And I sometimes fry what I'm cooking. As I was frying up some chicken for lunch, I noticed the plume of steam that rose when I removed the lid to turn the chicken. This got me thinking. If when I'm cooking chicken the steam is full of oil, which is evidenced by the fact that one a month I have to clean it off the ceiling over the stove, the vent hood, and numerous other places that it drifts to, then how can anyone suggest that oil cannot be airborne mixed in water vapor, and ultimately land somewhere else, ie rain.

I'm open to being wrong, but at this point, I think the NOAA guy is just plain not thinking straight or something.

Any cooks out there know what I mean?

[Duer 157099]

1. I think the temperature is the difference

Personally I think that the Gulf oil *will* go airborne with sufficient turbulence and wind, but no matter, we'll find out empirically very soon.

[Better Today]

6. Ah, good point. I guess the Gulf won't be reaching in excess of 450F, huh.

[spin]

10. If it does, oily rain will be the least of our problems. (n/t)

[Dr.Phool]

11. It's 89 degrees and climbing right now, off Clearwater Beach.

If we're bored, we can go over there and poach Flyarm!

[Dogmudgeon]

2. Petroleum is not just a simple lipid

It's a complex of literally hundreds of different substances, primarily alkanes (paraffins). When evaporation occurs from the oil spill, it happens in "fractions", and nearly none of the individual chemicals will follow the usual cycle of evaporation-condensation-rain.

It's possible that a waterspout could pick some up, and then you'd be able to get oil rain.

--d!

[Better Today]

5. Is cooking oil a simple lipid?

[Tesha]

35. Relatively speaking, yes. Much simpler than petroleum. (NT)

[Rex]

3. Hey, if it can rain frogs anything is possible!

Acid rain, meet your new best friend - toxic rain!

[Electric Monk]

18. Win

http://science.howstuffworks.com/rain-frog.htm/printable

[awoke_in_2003]

31. as long as it doesn't rain

oily frogs- the little bastards are slippery enough.

[mrJJ]

4. I'm No cook

A hurricane strike in the Gulf of Mexico would dump an oil & water mixture all over the South, potentially reaching hundreds of miles inland, said Kaku.

http://www.floridaoilspilllaw.com/michio-kaku-hurricane-impact-along-gulf-coast-to-dump-oil-all-over-the-south-potentially-100s-of-miles-inland


Shay said NOAA’s probes are finding oil hanging beneath the surface of the Gulf, waiting to be drawn into a storm.

“That’s a major concern,” he said. “If we get a hurricane moving through, it could upwell that oil.”

http://www.floridaoilspilllaw.com/expert-major-concern-that-oil-beneath-surface-to-be-drawn-into-storm

Gulf of Mexico - Water Vapor Loop

http://www.goes.noaa.gov/HURRLOOPS/huwvloop.html

or

http://www.hurricanecenter.com/gulf-of-mexico-satellite-images-and-maps/gulf-of-mexico-view-hurricane-water-vapor.html

[nebenaube]

7. It....

It has rained nearly every other two days for two to three days at a time since this leak started, the rivers in N. W. Wisconsin are almost at flood stage. You would not believe the quantity of foam on the river, On the Chippewa, just south of Chippewa Falls where highway 53 crosses the river; the foam trapped on the banks is a foot thick...

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

8. No.

The oil that you have to clean over your stove comes from splashing, boiling, frying, and so on.

The NOAA guy's fine. People actually worried about oil rain are not the ones thinking straight.

[Joe Fields]

13. Really? My what an interesting observation.

Hope you don't have to eat those words, but at least if you do, you'll have plenty of oil to fry them up with.

The oil is in the water. It would be shortsighted to say that much of that won't get drawn up into the atmosphere, either from evaporation or by a hurricane. We in the midwest are plenty worried about this, since most of the staple crops come from here. Could be one day you'll hear of farmers praying for NO rain!

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

15. "We in the midwest are plenty worried about this"

Well, maybe some of you in the midwest.

I don't have such a low opinion of people from the midwest that I think a significant portion of them are actually taking this seriously.

I've some questions for you:

Don't you think that the disaster is already bad enough that you've got to come up with imaginary nonsense like this?

Do you really think you're helping anything by inventing/believing this stuff?

[Joe Fields]

19. Damn, you'll believe anyone on teevee who wears an official hat

We'll see, professor.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

21. Actually, no, I believe my own education.

Perhaps you could take some night courses at your nearest community college.

[Poboy]

9. info

Raining oil in Louisiana? Video suggests Gulf oil spill causing crude rain

Raining oil? A video purports to show the aftermath of an oily rain that has left a rainbow sheen on the streets of River Ridge, Louisiana. The EPA says that an oily rain is highly unlikely.

Raining oil in Louisiana? An unsettling – and unverified – amateur video shows what appears to be the aftermath of an oily rain in Louisiana, some 45 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico.
It's unclear from the video whether the oily sheen seen on the ground really fell from the sky. Crude oil normally doesn't evaporate, but some are speculating that oil mixed with Corexit 9500, the dispersant that BP is using on the ever-growing slick, could take to the air.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has issued statements saying that the agency "has no data, information or scientific basis that suggests that oil mixed with dispersant could possibly evaporate from the Gulf into the water cycle."

The auto blog Jalopnik dug up a 2003 study that shows that oil on the open ocean could evaporate under the right conditions. And it's unclear how the Corexit 9500 dispersant affects evaporation.

If it were raining Corexit 9500 in River Ridge, that would be very bad news. Calling the dispersant unnecessarily toxic, the EPA has ordered BP to stop spraying it on the slick, an order that the oil company has so far ignored.

Is the video for real? For now, skepticism is warranted. Have a look for yourself:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/0624/Raining-oil-in-Louisiana-Video-suggests-Gulf-oil-spill-causing-crude-rain?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+feeds%2Fcsm+%28Christian+Science+Monitor+%7C+All+Stories%29

=====

I think this instance is not true. I think it was there already, and the person was looking for it, and just noticed it this time, as it is on people's minds. It rained that day, but no oil rain.
I also think Rachel was right to say 'no it wasn't oil rain', but she was a bit too dismissive of the concept. More info-

=====
It's Raining Oil In Louisiana?
Louisiana residents 45 miles off the Gulf of Mexico claim to have videotaped an oily substance raining down. Worst case scenario? It's petroleum mixed with Corexit, the cancer-causing dispersant BP's spraying on its oil slick. Best case scenario? Dirty roads.


Within a few days following a spill, light crude oils can lose up to 75 percent of their initial volume and medium crudes up to 40 percent. In contrast, heavy or residual oils will lose no more than 10 percent of their volume in the first few days following a spill. Most oil spill behavior models include evaporation as a process and as a factor in the output of the model.
The oil included in the Deepwater Horizon disaster is most certainly crude, and was at one point a heavy crude, which reduces the overall loss to evaporation, however it's been mixed up by the effects of the ocean and become an emulsification, which according to the study, enhances the likelihood of evaporation:

Emulsification, if it occurs, has a great effect on the behavior of oil spills at sea. As a result of emulsification, evaporation slows spreading by orders of magnitude, and the oil rides lower in the water column, showing different drag with respect to the wind.

http://jalopnik.com/5570961/its-raining-oil-in-louisiana

[izquierdista]

12. The chemist's answer

The post upthread was correct, you're not going to observe the familiar cycle of evaporation-condensation-precipitation as you do with water. To get condensation and precipitation of hydrocarbon, you would need an atmosphere where the hydrocarbon was at its saturation partial pressure, i.e., inside of a fractionating tower at an oil refinery.

However, that's not the only way evaporated hydrocarbon can come down. It has a small solubility in water, so each raindrop can be saturated with hydrocarbon, and it probably will be. There is physical adsorption. Hydrocarbon in the vapor phase (and it has been measured in the thousands of ppm at some locations) can adsorb onto the surface of a raindrop, exactly like the steam over the chicken fryer. Once it finds a solid surface to land, the water can re-evaporate, leaving the oil behind.

There are really three fractions to be concerned with in the spill. The natural gas fraction is going to be a gas at surface conditions of temperature and pressure. It is going to remain gas and be spread as currents in the atmosphere. The heaviest fraction is seen as tar washing up along beaches. It can bake in the sun and not lose significant mass, weathering like asphalt in a highway does. The middle fraction is a volatile liquid, which evaporates and adsorbs (to make a distinction between condense) depending on temperature and what surface is available. You're never going to see enough collect in anyplace to have a measurable quantity of liquid, but you are going to see thin films adsorbed onto any solid object. The entire Gulf Coast is going to be like the range hood at your favorite greasy spoon.

[mzteris]

16. but how is it going to to "up" in the first place? n/t

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

17. The very light stuff is going to evaporate.

The methane, the ethane, the propane, the butanes, the pentanes, etc.

But yeah, it's not going to condense.

[izquierdista]

22. Pentane will

The vapor pressure of pentane at temperatures along the Gulf is going to bracket the atmospheric pressure. That means that individual pentane molecules are going to be just at home floating through the air as a gas as they are adsorbed onto a surface as a condensed phase.

If you do the white glove test after an onshore breeze, and then put the white glove through a GC/MS, you're going to be able to see pentane.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

24. You're going to have some measurable pentanes in the atmosphere, yes.

Those pentanes will float around. Break down in the atmosphere by UV light, get filtered out by rain, condense glove, etc.

But you're not going to have a rain of pentanes.

The atmosphere is very big, and the spill is very small, by comparison. You're never going to get enough pentane in the air to have it condense and fall like rain like water does. Water only does cause there's an absolutely huge amount of it in the atmosphere, and it's enough to saturate and condense.

If oil could rain out of the atmosphere, you'd be having oil rain from other spills. Particularly larger spills than this like Ixtoc, or the bigger disaster in Africa.

[izquierdista]

27. We're on the same page

However, this is a difficult point to educate the public on. Condensation and rain are part of their common experience and knowledge, adsorption and desorption are not. I think I'm going to stick with the range hood at the greasy spoon as my teaching example until Bill Nye or Mr. Wizard come up with a better one.

[CabalPowered]

30. Thanks for this

:thumbsup:

[mzteris]

14. did you guys learn about the "water cycle" in like third grade?

Don't think oil is going to "evaporate", rise up into the clouds, condensate and then precipitate.

Here, maybe this is easier:





If a hurricane blows through and the WIND picks up the oil and deposits it elsewhere, that is still not "rain".

[apocalypsehow]

20. The steam rising from your cooking pot is the water vapor from the chicken carcass you were frying.

It had nary a drop of "oil" in it. A by-product of heating oil to the flash-over point is indeed impurities in the oil that reach critical temperature before the oil itself burns, but that is emitted in the form of smoke, like the residue burning that comes off of Tiki lamps.

[Better Today]

23. Wow, I'm guessing you never cleaned a kitchen. It's oil alright.

But as mentioned above, it is likely the temperature of the moisture (water) cooking off of and out of the chicken which hold the oil and does not relate to the gulf any time soon.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

25. Water vapor doesn't hold oil.

Like I said, you could mechanically lift oil out of the pot if you've got a high enough boil that you're splashing. But water vapor doesn't lift anything mechanically.

You can't fractionally distill cooking oil out of a pot of boiling water at STP.

[Better Today]

26. It is travelling with the steam, so it may not be a part of the steam itself, but it

sure goes where the steam goes. And some of those places are not in any direct line from the cooking pot. This oily steam gets everywhere and the oil residue goes with it. Somehow the steam and the oil are moving together to another place and being deposited. Still, I do think it has more to do with the temps and therefore actual oily rain from the gulf is unlikely.

[yella_dawg]

28. Oil is made of numerous volatile substances.

Oil is made of numerous volatile substances. I've seen petroleum boil in a bucket sitting in the sun on a hot day. There's no telling what the fractional derivatives of this oil are, and the dispersant modifies the behavior of each component. You could possibly get a cloud of petroleum vapors that when rained on, contaminates the falling drops. That's why you don't eat snow, except this would be a far more extreme case of airborne pollution.

This is basically what you're talking about, except cooking oil won't vaporize to any major extent lying out in the sun. Petroleum distillates, on the other hand, will poof into vapor in far cooler conditions.

Is this likely in Florida at this point? Wouldn't think so, but I doubt it's impossible.

[eowyn_of_rohan]

33. self delete

[Better Today]

34. Wow, excellent answer. I hadn't thought about the varying volitility

from relatively benign cooking and petroleum. Well, I had been convinced of the not-likely scenario, but now I'm back at worried. Better to be informed, though.

[darkstar3]

29. To anyone worried about this, I suggest a simple test.

1. Obtain some crude oil.
2. Mix it with a large quantity of salt water.
3. Leave it outside under a glass covering until the water evaporates and covers the glass.
4. Test the water deposited on the glass for the presence of crude oil. Various ways are available for doing this, including pH testing, density testing, and so on.

Personally, I'm not worried about oily rain. Trace amounts of naturally occurring chemicals shouldn't worry us. I'm worried about oily storm surge. Of course, I don't have to worry too much about that personally here in MO, but that doesn't stop me from being concerned about what it will do to the southeast.

[Curmudgeoness]

32. I cook just like you do, and understand exactly what you describe.

My situation isn't only in water vapor, if I fry a burger, and there is a ray of sunshine, I see grease particles floating in the air, and I know it is oily from the cleaning I do, and not just right over the stove. Now, whether this is possible in the Gulf, I do not know, but I do know that 1) the burn-off smoke is in the air, and that is oily, 2) they tell me all about how much of this oil will evaporate, meaning it will be in the air, and 3) if you have been through a hurricane, you know that a lot of surface water becomes airborne. I'm with you, this does not sound impossible to me.

[AdHocSolver]

36. The mechanism that will disperse the Gulf oil across the U.S. is not evaporation, but wind.

The model of what is to come can be seen in the dispersal of volcanic ash (essentially small particles of rock) by the wind. Volcanic ash can remain in the upper atmosphere for weeks and months blocking out sunlight and disrupting the growing season.

What will disperse the Gulf of Mexico oil spill will be the wind picking up oil droplets (made worse by BP's use of dispersants) and spreading them over a large portion of the U.S.

There are two possible effects of this spreading of oil in the upper atmosphere. One is the effect it will have on sunlight reaching the earth, depending on how the oil droplets block or reflect sunlight. The second effect will occur when the oil eventually reaches earth with rainfall. This oil could poison and kill crops across significant amounts of the U.S.

This oil spill has not yet wreaked its worst effects on this country. We are part of a giant experiment in disaster courtesy of the oil companies. BP is the worst, but not the only bringer of destruction.