Salinity - Why Parts Per Thousand

[redfishbluefish]

I’ve reached an age where the little things in life are starting to bother me. And this is one that has pestered my little brain for some time. Why do we report salinity in parts per thousand? This is commonly reported as “ppt” or with this crazy looking symbol, ‰, that I’m sure some people confuse as percent. Why confuse us? Why not just use percent….parts per hundred…%......which everyone is familiar with and knows what it means.? Why can’t I simply say my salinity is 3 ½ percent...or for the decimal people, 3.5 percent? Everyone understands that! 3.5% is the same as 35‰. Is this a marketing scam, trying to make it sound like it’s a big number? So who can help me understand this so I can tackle other problems that are bothering me?

OK, now I have got to get back to work trying to figure out why my belly button collects lint, and why some people have “innies” and some have “outies.” Very, very busy today.

 

[Azedenkae]

I’ve reached an age where the little things in life are starting to bother me. And this is one that has pestered my little brain for some time. Why do we report salinity in parts per thousand? This is commonly reported as “ppt” or with this crazy looking symbol, ‰, that I’m sure some people confuse as percent. Why confuse us? Why not just use percent….parts per hundred…%......which everyone is familiar with and knows what it means.? Why can’t I simply say my salinity is 3 ½ percent...or for the decimal people, 3.5 percent? Everyone understands that! 3.5% is the same as 35‰. Is this a marketing scam, trying to make it sound like it’s a big number? So who can help me understand this so I can tackle other problems that are bothering me?

OK, now I have got to get back to work trying to figure out why my belly button collects lint, and why some people have “innies” and some have “outies.” Very, very busy today.

Not sure about other fields, but in my field the thousand separators are important. They correspond to the milli-, micro-, nano-, pico-, etc. prefixes which just makes calculations so much easier. So, ppt, ppm, ppb is yeah what we like to use. When we start to try and be fancy and use percents, centi-, etc. but that just makes life way harder. Hence rather than reporting stuff in centimeters, we would do millimeters even if it's like hundreds of millimeters which may be far harder to imagine than tens of centimeters. Like when I read up on clownfish, sizes are also consistently reported in millimeters too. Haha sometimes that takes me a moment, but well, there is an understanding that yeah, just do thousands to make it easier for bigger calculations.

With that said, when it comes to reporting concentrations of reagents or whatever, we default back to percent... so... yeah. >_>"

 

[Garf]

It’s even more confusing to us Europeans when Americans use spoons and cups / gallon. You are getting off lightly.

 

[elysics]

Its ppt because it's grams of salt in kilograms of saltwater. And it's easier to think about grams, or milligrams or micrograms, than it is to think about dekagrams etc.

 

[redfishbluefish]

It’s even more confusing to us Europeans when Americans use spoons and cups / gallon. You are getting off lightly.

And you didn't even mention Imperial gallons versus US gallons! Now I'm really scratching my head. I know this would always screw me up when I would drive in Canada and go to buy gas.....just seemed so expensive, while the gas in the US was more affordable....and yes, I realize you got more gas, but again, it's my simple mind.