Electric Clouds

[mharratsc]

I'm guessing soap suds too. Suds in a very dry clime can become so dry they 'crunch'... and watching that guy make a hole in the 'cloud' with his hand- literally bending the material- reminds me of just that.

It was probably blown off from some guy washing his Mercedes-Benz upwind...

[jjohnson]

My interpretation of the "cloud" being stuck in a fence (?? !) is that it was a loose piece of fluffy, white polyester batting blown along by the wind. Certainly possible in Qatar or anywhere else in the world when it isn't raining, thanks to this carbon-based species' penchant for failing to dispose of such trash responsibly.

Naturally, my "interpretation" is just as open to doubt as is anyone else's. I sure don't have the keys to any magic kindom here.

Jim

[CharlesChandler]

If you mean that a cloud droplet is heavier than air, and should be falling, you're right, but the droplets don't fall very fast. A typical droplet has a radius of 10 micrometers, which gives it a calculated terminal velocity of less than 0.33 m/s (.75 mph). (Experimentally-derived measurements are even slower, but vary widely.) Anyway, at that rate, to fall from the top of a thunderstorm, at 10 km above ground, it will take 10 km x 1000 x 3 = 30,000 seconds, which is 8.3 hours. A hailstone can make it in less than 20 minutes.

[Dotini]

Scientific American weighs in very carefully on the subject of cloud formation, and by implication, global warming.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... osmic-rays

[Dotini]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... ystem.html

This article explains how charge separation can be created, structured, propagated and maintained in ice. This may be an important factor in explaining how some clouds can gather the energy necessary to generate the electron showers required to cause gamma rays and antimatter formation. It may also account for how clouds are able to generate the energy required to manifest ball lightning phenomena.

Respectfully submitted,
Steve

[webolife]

Great find, Dotini!
This is supported Pollard's research into the structured nature of ice that he demonstrated to us in the lab.
Regions of electric ice particles aligned like a giant battery, if they existed for example in an Oort type zone, could be major contributors to the electric field of a stellar system.

[Dotini]

Great find, Dotini!

Thanks, Gordon, but not deserved. Oracle 911 posted this same find in the Electric Universe forum in it's own thread, allowing me to find it there. Tip of the hat to Oracle 911.

Respectfully,
Steve

[CharlesChandler]

From the article that Dotini quoted:

For a century, scientists have known that charged particles from space constantly bombard Earth. Known as cosmic rays, the particles are mostly protons blasted out of supernovae. As the protons crash through the planet's atmosphere, they can ionize volatile compounds, causing them to condense into airborne droplets, or aerosols. Clouds might then build up around the droplets.

I may be way off base here, as I haven't studied cosmic rays, but something about this doesn't ring true. Incoming high-energy protons help form aerosols by ionizing the existing molecules? Ionization generally inhibits condensation, as electrostatic repulsion exerts a force that opposes it. (The "Rayleigh limit" defines the amount of ionization that a condensate can tolerate before getting split apart by electrostatic repulsion, and this limit is hit regularly in thunderstorms, and is an important factor in predicting droplet size. See http://phd.marginean.net/rayleigh.html for more info.) So they might be right, but I want to know what's overpowering the electrostatic repulsion.

A more general concept has the cosmic rays stopping in the stratosphere or above, and not interacting directly with the aerosols. The relationship is then different. The fair weather field is important in cloud formation in that it polarizes the neutrally-charged, yet dipolar water molecules, and polarization is prerequisite to polymerization. So the fair weather field gets all of the molecules facing in the same direction, and then when they collide with each other, they'll be more likely to stick together, because all three atoms in the H2O molecule will develop covalent bonds with the other molecule. If this is correct, then a stronger fair weather field means more cloud droplets forming. And if that is true, and if cosmic rays are mostly protons, and since the fair weather field is between the positively-charged ionosphere and the negatively-charged Earth, the cosmic rays are increasing the fair weather field, which then increases the formation of cloud droplets by polarizing the molecules. If the cosmic rays made it all of the way into the troposphere, they'd actually blow apart the fledgling aerosols, by impact or by ionization. But if the incoming protons are stopped in the stratosphere or above, they aren't directly interacting with the aerosols -- they're just contributing to the fair weather field, that helps neutrally-charged water vapor condense.

Sounds like the data to make/break this hypothesis should already be in existence, so I just have to figure out where to find them. But this is interesting to me because I already found an inverse causal relationship between sunspots and tornado fatalities, while I had no idea of what was causing it. Now it sounds like the CMEs that result from sunspots are powering up the magnetosphere, which blocks cosmic rays. The relationship might be that the stronger magnetosphere, in blocking the cosmic rays, results in a weaker fair weather field, which means fewer cloud droplets forming, less storms, and less tornado fatalities.

Anyway, I'll post back if I find more data.

[Dotini]

A detailed description of how cosmic ray particles nucleate cloud formation is found in the important book, "The Chilling Stars: A Cosmic View of Climate Change", by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder. Svensmark is one of the lead scientists in the CERN CLOUD project, a multi-year experiment involving over 50 scientists from the world's most prestigious institutions using the massive CERN accelerator. I believe it is essential, required and necessary reading for all EU fans and climate change change skeptics in general. Fortunately, it is under $10 from amazon.com.

Respectfully submitted,
Steve

Edit: I need to correct a previous post where I attributed the New Scientist "Electric Ice" post to Oracle 911. Actually, it was ouchbox.

[CharlesChandler]

Here's a brief introduction to cosmoclimatology:

Svensmark, Henrik (2007). "Cosmoclimatology: a new theory emerges". Astronomy & Geophysics (Blackwell Publishing) 48 (1): 18–24

By 2005 we had found a causal mechanism by which cosmic rays can facilitate the production of clouds (Svensmark et al. 2007). The data revealed that electrons released in the air by cosmic rays act as catalysts. They significantly accelerate the formation of stable, ultra-small clusters of sulphuric acid and water molecules which are building blocks for the cloud condensation nuclei.

So the particles in question are not protons -- they're muons (a.k.a., "heavy electrons"). Regardless, what I was saying earlier and what they're talking about are two totally different things. They found a strong correlation between muons and low cloud cover (<3.2 km). So the particles are making it all of the way through the stratosphere, and into the lower troposphere. But I guess I'll have to read the book to find out exactly what kind of chemical processes they're talking about, because they didn't get into that in the paper cited.

[webolife]

Yeah, I thought muons right away also... I've done dry ice cloud chamber stuff with my students occasionally - - muons decay very rapidly but it makes sense that they may interact with and alter sulfuric molecules in the atmosphere during their brief existence, helping to nucleate cloud droplets. If this is a widespread or general phenomenon in droplet formation, however, I would think that there would have been more evidence accumulated by now to confirm such a cosmic connection... Charles, did you find anything?

[Drethon]

Just a comment on the blue green clouds, we had a storm in west Michigan a month or two ago that I saw the blue green clouds with my own eyes. This picture gives you some idea of what it looked like but in my memory the color was a little more intense, wish I had snapped a picture.



What is particularly eerie about it is the light looks like storm clouds that are lessening but when those clouds actually arrive overhead things turn dark...

[CharlesChandler]

That's a faithful review of the standard explanation for cloud electrification, but it would be useful to fill in some of the blanks.

The hydrometeors are only frozen above the freezing line, at 4~5 km above the ground. Below that they're liquid, except of course for the larger ice particles such as sleet or hail that don't completely melt as they fall. You're right that it's the ice crystals that are responsible for the charge separation, but triboelectric charging (i.e., "static electricity") isn't the mechanism. A balloon rubbed against hair transfers electrons, because rubber and hair are dissimilar materials separated by some distance on the triboelectric series. A more detailed account of the hypothetical charging mechanisms can be found in one of my previous posts:

http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum/phpB ... 641#p54641

The bottom line is that the charging occurs at the top of the cloud, in the anvil, where microscopic, positively charged ice crystals are left behind while heavier, negatively charged particles fall due to their higher terminal velocity.

There is a causal relationship between lightning and fast-moving, turbulent airflows in the storm. This is the source of the suspicion that it's the speed of the air itself that develops the charge separation, hence it's air moving rapidly past other air -- triboelectric charging. But as I said, that would only work if dissimilar substances were involved, and they're not. The mechanisms described in my previous post would work even without turbulence, though there would still have to be an updraft supplying the water to the anvil. The significance of powerful turbulence appears not to be that it is actually the source of the electric field, but rather, that once charges have been separated, turbulence can bring oppositely charged parcels of air into closer proximity faster, increasing the chance of an arc discharge.

But this still leaves a lot on the table. Arc discharges in the atmosphere shouldn't be possible, as it shouldn't be possible to develop the necessary charge densities and gradients. Electrostatic pressure should disperse the charges, and glow discharges should neutralize the potentials long before an arc discharge occurs. Here we have to remember that we're talking about an open-air system, and it takes tens of minutes to develop the charge densities necessary for lightning. So it's not like charging up a capacitor and then flipping a switch to instantaneously provide a path to ground -- the charge separation has plenty of time to bleed off, even as new charges are pumped into the same air. Attempts to reproduce arc discharges in the laboratory in the air itself have all failed for these reasons. So what consolidates the charges, and then brings them into proximity with opposite charges, and prevents the neutralization by glow discharge, such that the charge separation persists until the arc discharge occurs? Seeking an answer to that question is the focus of current research.

[jjohnson]

Regarding the chemistry involved in Svensmark's wide-ranging hypothesis in The Chilling Stars (also dated 2007, as is his paper Chandler linked to), he has a nice discussion on what sorts of things water droplets condense and grow on in order to form clouds. This is in addition to the presence of muons in the lower atmosphere and the resulting albedo changes to the planet, etc. The following paraphrases and summarizes the gist of this part of the process.

About p. 104 he gets into the oceans' contribution to specks - the tiny basic things, much smaller than dust and smoke particles that we usually think of. Oceans constantly emit large quantities of sulfur into the atmosphere, in the form of dimethyl sulfide. This is the result when sea creatures graze on plankton (microscopic plants), rupturing their cells, and allowing bacteria to consume the remnants. Dimethyl sulfide is the by-product of this bacterial digestion process. Chemical action during the day, in the air, driven by sunlight, drives a conversion process: to sulfur dioxide, that reacts with water that results in tiny specks of sulfuric acid in the air. A similar process creates nitric acid droplets from byproducts of lightning strikes and microbial action in soil.

It turns out that dust particles and even pollen are too large to be effective as condensation nuclei, and tiny specks from vapors and gases "that abound in the air" are so small that they aren't effective at making large clouds. But material that clump together into the ideal size - around 100 nm - become ideal cloud condensation nuclei. Of these, sulfuric acid is the morst important worldwide. Over the continents, the chief source of sulfur in the air is human activities - mainly fossil fuel burning. Sea salt, thrown up by wave action, is the second most important contributor over the oceans, providing about 10% of the necessary specks of the right size.

The specks get washed out of the atmosphere by rain, or convected into the stratosphere by thunderstorm s and other winds aloft , and need to be replenished constantly. Svensmark's research found that patrol aircraft with sensors sniffing for dimethyl sulfide in tropical atmospheric research flights recorded sudden anomalous events that resulted in a huge increase in the nucleation rate. Turns out that muons facilitate this process tremendously. The story goes on and is a fascinating look into his research, setbacks and victorious findings both.

It's really a good read, and goes into a lot that the paper above did not

Jim.

[Maol]

Greetings,

Have you seen this video or others similarly showing the electrical activity in clouds causing ice crystals, responding to the electric field in a manner similar to iron filings in a moving magnetic field, to orient their polar alignment in unison, so as to refract sunlight in collimation and by their motion show the activity of the electric field?

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap111108.html