Within the span of a year, I twice faced the same question in slightly different forms. The first time it came from Tom Schlatter, who fields questions from readers of Weatherwise. He wrote to me that a reader had “asked why running water freezes more slowly than still water. The stock answer is friction, but I would like to do better than that.” I responded with quantitative arguments that (fluid) friction is irrelevant, and there the matter stood.

Topics
Friction, Hydrology
1.
Henry A. Bent, The Second Law (Oxford University Press, New York, 1965), pp. 14–15.
2.
David Brunt, Physical & Dynamical Meteorology (Cambridge University Press, 1952), pp. 39–41.
3.
John A. Dutton, The Ceaseless Wind (McGraw-Hill, New York,1976), pp. 67–72.
4.
Craig F. Bohren and Bruce A. Albrecht, Atmospheric Thermodynamics (Oxford University Press, New York, 1998), pp. 108–115.
5.
Craig F. Bohren, What Light Through Yonder Window Breaks? (Wiley, New York, 1991), pp. 121–129.
6.
Rudolph Geiger, The Climate Near the Ground (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1965), p. 74–75.
7.
O. G. Sutton, Micrometeorology (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1953), p. 203.
8.
Hermann Schlichting, Boundary-Layer Theory, 6th ed. (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1968), p. 266.
9.
John H. Lienhard IV and John H. Lienhard V, A Heat Transfer Textbook, 3rd ed. (Phlogiston Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003), p. 21.
10.
R. R. Rogers and M. K. Yau, A Short Course in Cloud Physics, 3rd ed. (Pergamon, Oxford, 1989), p. 151.
11.
Craig F. Bohren, Clouds in a Glass of Beer (Wiley, New York, 1987), pp. 181–184.
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© 2004 American Association of Physics Teachers.
2004
American Association of Physics Teachers
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