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Spherical Cow Issues



Introduction

deriving scale height

Scale height is a useful concept for thinking about atmospheres and making simple estimations. It can be easily measured experimentally on Earth. Although there are many approximations used in our calculations modeling scale height, it turns out to be reasonably accurate as most of the "errors" are relatively small.

Our treatment of scale height involves the following spherical cow issues:

When asked whether scale height was a useful concept, the cow pictured above enthusiastically responded "Moooooooo".