Welcome to the Atmosculator Homepage

Mobile-sized static table
(If you have an iPhone, click on the above link, and then make a web clip)

Atmosculator is a freeware Mac OS X application, written using Cocoa & Objective-C, that calculates key properties of the Earth's atmosphere as a function of altitude using the 1976 Standard Atmosphere Model. It can be used to determine the pressure, temperature, density, viscosity and other parameters up to an altitude of 278,385 feet (84.852 km). The 1976 model is the latest of a number of versions developed jointly by NOAA, NASA and the USAF. The complete model includes properties at even higher altitudes, but these regions are more complex and are not included here.

Atmosculator also provides the option of calculating properties under non-standard conditions - i.e. when the temperature differs from that of the standard model.

Although the values provided by Atmosculator have been carefully checked against the original U.S. Government source, their accuracy cannot be guaranteed, so please use this tool at your own risk.

(If the above link does not work, try: U.S. Standard Atmosphere 1976 which is linked from this page of the NASA Technical Reports Server. This link might also be somewhat useful: U.S. Standard Atmosphere 1976)

Atmosculator includes extensive Help on the basis of the model and a mathematical derivation showing how the properties are calculated. For your online convenince, this description of the Standard Atmosphere Model is reproduced here

Screenshot:

(Version 2.03 expired at the end of 2007)
Download v2.04 as:

Zip Archive

Note 1) v2.04 says it has expired, but you can continue using it;
Note 2) there is a sign error in Atmosculator's built-in documentation, but NOT in the app itself.
Please see this ERRATA for the online documentation.
Thanks to R. Wayne Wilson for catching this.
This will be corrected in the next release.

Version History:

For v2.02:
(1/1/2006-12/31/2006)

For v2.04:
(1/1/2008-12/31/2008)

• application will now expire gracefully; it will warn of pending expiration once per day starting 28 days from expiration, and when the expiration date has been passed, the user will have the option to either quit or continue
• minor changes to Help

Note that 2.04 is still a PPC-only version but should work correctly (under Rosetta) on any Intel Mac.
I expect to release a Universal Binary in the future, possibly with AppleScript support.
If you would like to be notified when new versions (other than those due to annual expirations) become available, send an e-mail to me at:
info2 @ atmosculator . com.