Since we know that pressure drops as we gain altitude (that's why air is so thin on mountain-tops) we can compute the current altitude knowing the pressure and temperature. Again, there's a bit of hairy math involved, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometric_pressure you can read about the calculations on wikipedia] (where this graph is from). | Since we know that pressure drops as we gain altitude (that's why air is so thin on mountain-tops) we can compute the current altitude knowing the pressure and temperature. Again, there's a bit of hairy math involved, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometric_pressure you can read about the calculations on wikipedia] (where this graph is from). |