Question
I recently began renting a car port from my landlord. Though it is little more than a roof, fully exposed to the elements, I found that there was no frost on my car windows this morning. Yet not eight feet away, a car parked outside the car port had a thick layer of frost on the windshields. None of the cars parked in the car ports had frost, and all of the ones parked outside the car ports had frost Why is this?
Luke Collins from Concord, NH.
Answer
Dave Ansell answered this icy question...
Dave - To understand this, you've got to understand first of all, what is frost and how is it happening?
基本上,发生的是,在晚上,特别是if there's a clear sky at night - anything which is warm radiates heat. You're radiating heat all the time, that's the thing which the heat cameras you sometimes see on these films on the TV are seeing when people glow really brightly. That's because they're warmer. They're radiating more infrared heat. So, basically, the warmer something is, the more heat it loses. If you're inside the house, you're losing heat all the time, but so are the walls. You're heated up by the heat coming off the walls and it's heated by you, so you don't feel that cold, because actually quite a lot of energy is beamed into you from the walls of the house.
But, if you go outside on a cold clear night, you're basically just seeing the sky, and the temperature of deep space is about 2.9 degrees above absolute zero - about minus 270 degrees centigrade. That's really, really cold. So there's no heat coming down onto you and so you're just radiating heat and you lose heat very quickly. The same thing happens to the ground. The ground loses heat very quickly. It cools down and then once it gets below the frost point of the air, water starts condensing out of the air onto it and starts forming frost. Eventually all the water is condensed out of the air and it becomes very dry. There's nothing more left to condense out.
Whereas, under a carport, the top of the roof will cool down quite a lot, probably down to slightly below zero, but that's still a lot, lot warmer than the sky. So the roof is still radiating some heat down onto the ground, inside the carport, so that keeps it slightly warmer than everything else. Because of this, all of the moisture tends to condense everywhere else rather than inside the carport. So, even if, by the end of the night, it did get down to below zero, all the water vapour is already condensed everywhere else. So, there's no frost inside the carport.
Chris - And I will add that, perhaps the water which is going to condense is going to come down out of the sky and if there is a physical barrier there, then it's likely to settle on that roof, more than on the car underneath the roof, and therefore, there isn't anything to freeze on the glass even though the glass is very, very cold anyway. You're going to end up with a clear windscreen rather than a frosty one...
Comments
Ground frost
I was curious as to why, when the ground is covered with frost, there are still some spots which have none. I am a truck drivers wife. Been riding with him for most of the 20plus yrs he’s been out here. I notice, and question, ALOT of things. So, I do a lot of Googling. I couldn’t find an answer to THIS question.
Ground temperature varies...
The temperature of the ground is an important factor. If something has kept a patch of ground at a higher temperature than the surroundings - such as a vehicle that had parked and then moved off, or an underground water supply or drain, or electrical apparatus releasing heat - this will create a hot-spot that will affect the formation of frost.
Frost
Can frost get under car on a deep cold night
Yes
...it could do, but the same answer applies as was supplied above: the ground is not radiating heat to the sky but at the underneath of a car, and vice versa. This means that the ground temperature beneath the car will be slightly higher than, say, the windscreen of the car, which is seeing the sky. Also, the ground beneath the car will have lower air-flow, so less water-laden air will circulate over the surface, even if it does become sufficiently cold to freeze, so the rate of frost formation beneath the car is going to be lower for that reason too.
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