Electric Clouds

[mharratsc]

Reminds me of what the anode tufts look like on the Sun... o.O

[Sparky]

@ http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/Hubble20thannyfeature.html

the larger images of this shows a few of the

mammatus clouds

type things....

[remelic]

Reminds me of the surface of the sun we see.



Something cellular; probably individual vortices creating each pocket.

[remelic]

Reminds me of what the anode tufts look like on the Sun... o.O

We see the same thing.....

I didn't even see your post there. heh.

[Dotini]

Why do clouds coalesce water vapor rather than diffuse it, in light of the fact that small condensing vapor molecules are generally negatively charged? Shouldn't the electrical repulsion between the droplets prevent them from forming clouds at all? But what is being observed in laboratory experiments is that the surface of water, including surface tension, but also situations like water vapor condensing around nuclei of condensation in the atmosphere [which nuclei are also negatively charged, this being a surprise to me, webolife] creates a layer of positive charge around it, [which Pollack refers to as] the exclusion zone or EZ. When two or more droplets are in the vicinity of each other, this positive charged EZ is increased in the zone just between the particles, creating a region of neg/pos/neg in which the neg charges actually attract toward each other, as Feynman said, "Like likes like."

Clouds are amazing.

Clouds combine apparently simple inputs - water droplets and sunlight - into a system that coalesces, separates charge, and self-assembles into a particle accelerator. Near light-speed particle beams, gamma rays and antimatter result from ordinary thunderclouds. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST ... torms.html

Formerly, it had been thought that gamma rays were produced only by radioactive decay or stars collapsing in distant space. Sprites and elves are emitted upwards from thunderclouds, too. It is not easy to explain because, even given the high voltages available in thunder clouds, it is surprising that particles can be accelerated to the high energies required.

NASA is still arguing internally about all this. They agree that some form of relativistic runaway electron avalanche mechanism is going on somewhere inside or near thunderclouds, but beyond that there are "many uncertainties".

Japanese researchers have been looking into the problem from an earlier time: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/31092
Physicists have known for over a decade that 10 - 20 MeV gamma rays are produced in millisecond bursts during electrical storms. These bursts are believed to occur when high voltages in a thundercloud accelerate electrons to energies up to about 35 MeV. These electrons are slowed down by colliding with atoms in the air and as a result give off bremsstrahlung -- gamma rays that are created when an electron is deflected off its course by an atom.

Tsuchiya believes that the pulse was probably created while electrical energy was building up in the thundercloud, rather than when energy is being discharged as lightning. He adds that the process is likely to begin with a cosmic ray passing through the cloud and ionizing the air to produce electrons, which are accelerated to towards the bottom of the cloud, which has a positive charge. These electrons ionize other atoms on the way, creating a stream of high-energy electrons.

David Smith, a physicist at the University of California at Santa Clara and an expert on atmospheric gamma ray pulses, agrees that the pulse was made in a thundercloud accelerator. “The spectrum looks just right for bremsstrahlung”, he says. According to Smith, the millions of volts required to produce MeV electrons could be sustained in a cloud for seconds or even minutes as long as the stream of electrons does not become so intense that it causes an avalanche-like electric breakdown of the type that could lead to lightning.

I challenge the Thunderbolts forum to review Pollack's video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7jKL2-B0QA, and help develop an A to Z theory that explains and links cloud formation, charge separation, self-assembly into a particle accelerator, and final discharges of electrons into sprites, jets, elves and gamma ray flashes.

We know that lightning is an essential ingredient in the electrical cycle that balances Earth's surface with its atmosphere, as it delivers negative charge to the surface which balances positive coronal discharge from grass, leaves and other pointed objects. Gushes of fresh water rain that follow lightning and thunder fall onto our fields and rivers, and are a vital part of our ecology. Clouds perform an obviously essential role in our lives, and that of the planet itself.

If we could better explain the puzzling workings of clouds, it would be a giant step forward for the
Thunderbolts project.

Respectfully submitted,
Steve

[Dotini]

Okay, I've got an hypothesis.
1) In structured water (EZ), electrical dipoles are oriented in the same direction, sometimes hundreds of layers thick in the lab. A battery is formed.
2) Cloud are formed of structured water. Some thunderclouds are miles high, with positive charge building strongly at the top, and negative charge building strongly toward the bottom. Lightning discharges this potential millions of times/minute all over earth, and this is only the lightning striking earth. Inter-cloud and intra-cloud lighting is another matter.
3) Suppose that, maybe 500 times day, the column of structured, supercooled water extends from the bottom to the top. What we have now is a coherent medium, something like a laser, and insulated from outside influence, which upon upward discharge can accelerate collimated electrons to near lightspeeds required for subsequent collisions resulting in gamma rays and antimatter.

Please criticize, correct and debunk as required,
Steve

[webolife]

The cloud would not have to be totally structured, just generally and dynamically so... flashes at just about any frequency, from visual or below to gamma, would result somewhat chaotically depending on particular conditions within the cloud... just thinking

[seasmith]

webolife wrote:

When two or more droplets are in the vicinity of each other, this positive charged EZ is increased in the zone just between the particles, creating a region of neg/pos/neg in which the neg charges actually attract toward each other, as Feynman said, "Like likes like.

And Dr. Pollack repeatedly quotes the great man saying, "likes like likes*. Now i can't vouch for exactly what Feyman
(who has promulgated a number of fallacies in his career) meant to convey with that catchy phrase, but "likes" needn't necessarily mean 'attracts'.
It can just as well confer the fact that like charges, or clouds of charge can be impelled to some preferential zone or space, by opposing charge domains.

Dotini wrote:

What we have now is a coherent medium, something like a laser,..

.

Electric cloud theory is evolving, like so many other areas of plasma and plasma/crystal research, from primary terms of heat-driven molecular motion, to more of light-driven charge migration.
Photonic irradiation leads to Gamma decay, which can itself be collimated.


It's raining here,
c

[hertz]

Not exactly sure this should go here, but seems relevant:

cosmic ray cloud formation theory

CERN ‘gags’ physicists in cosmic ray climate experiment
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/18/c ... t-results/

And for the more quantitatively oriented
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/05/ind ... -estimate/

more normal science, around which revolutions pivot?

[Dotini]

http://www.atmos-chem-phys.org/10/10941 ... 1-2010.pdf
Cosmic rays, solar flux linked to cloud changes.

http://faculty.washington.edu/ghp/image ... _Zheng.pdf
Long range forces extending from polymer gel surfaces (Liquid Crystalline Water, EZ water)

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc ... st19jan_1/
Wave frequency of lightning

Respectfully submitted,
Steve

[jjohnson]

What part does the jet stream play in tornado formation? Meteorologists have known that the long swift river of air called the jet stream has helped breed tornadoes in conjunction with masses of warm air and of cold air. They have long suspected the arctic jet stream that sweeps down from Canada as a major factor in producing U.S. tornadoes, but photographs from a space satellite in 1968 provided conclusive evidence that the sub- tropical jet streams sweeping out of the Pacific Ocean through Mexico play a major role in the creation of tornadoes.

From
this site.

Jet streams aloft, sweeping over CB (cumulonimbus, or thunderstorm) buildups, particularly associated with the US Midwest thunderstorm region, have been said to remove the rising thermal energy from the anvil head of mature storms reaching into the troposphere at a faster rate than would occur naturally through just dissipation at the top. This, it is thought, would increase the vertical wind shear and create a higher delta-T between top and bottom of the storm - thus powering higher energy events like more powerful tornadoes.

Another thought is that the charged ice crystals present in the cirroform clouds constituting the anvil (frozen, not supercooled liquid droplets) may have greater charge conferred upon them by the wind shear at the interface between horizontal jet and rising updrafts in the cloud's core, although that is more conjectural.

If you look at Dr. Pollack's diagrams of the charge distributions in structured water, often extending millions of molecules thick, it is intrinsically the same thing as a double layer in plasma. That the ensuing voltage differentials (i.e., electric fields between differently charged layers) might become large enough to accelerate lightweight electrons to relativistic velocities seems no less likely in a thunderstorm than in a small Birkeland current such as the "flux tubes" connecting Io's poles with Jupiter's.

Gamma rays are now accepted as coming from thunderstorms.

Once again, mysteries begin to open up upon closer examination using electric field and electricity-based interpretations to link apparently unrelated observations of disparate phenomena at a variety of scales.

I would not be surprised to see a future headline in the science press that reads, "large magnetic fields measured in and near thunderstorms found to cause antimatter beams and lightning". {Full disclosure: I made that up.] Well duh. Electric fields and magnetic fields do not "cause" one another. Separation of charges by whatever means creates an electric field. Electric fields "cause" charged particles within them to accelerate and, instantly upon moving, charged particles (i.e. electrical currents) simultaneously exhibit the magnetic field that accompanies the electric field. The very large charge separations in thunderstorms can and do cause large charged particle flows, and their accompanying magnetic fields, and their accompanying physical displays such as lightning, tornadoes, gamma rays, antimatter jets, etc.

A model simulation displaying Poynting vectors in a supercell would be interesting indeed. And danged hard to do numerically for so large and complex a phenomenon as a storm.

Jim

[jjohnson]

Here is a recent link to an abstract on the electrical nature of a tornado.

[mharratsc]

(From the title page:)

Electric Currents Accompanying Tornado Activity


Marx Brook

Science
New Series, Vol. 157, No. 3795 (Sep. 22, 1967), pp. 1434-1436
(article consists of 3 pages)

Published by: American Association for the Advancement of Science

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1723338

Abstract
Measurements of the magnetic field and earth current in the vicinity of a tornado show large step-like deflections coincident with the touching down of the funnel. Calculations with a simple current model indicate that a minimum current of several hundred amperes must be postulated to account for the observed deflection in magnetic field. The existence of a steady current of 225 amperes for a period of about 10 minutes provides joule heat at the rate of approximately 10$^{10}$ joules per second, and involves a total charge transfer of 135,000 coulombs. The calculations imply that a tornado is electrically equivalent to several hundred isolated thunderstorm cells active simultaneously.

(Highlight mine)

See- THAT is what I was talking about! That was the point that I was trying to make with Charles Chandler in the other tornado thread we had going, but there wasn't any data to support the sustained current flow.

This shows that missing data!

[jjohnson]

See what Charles says about this, Mike. He may want to read the article, but there's the ol' PayWall barrier, of course.

If interested enough, he may break down and spring for it.

Jim

[CharlesChandler]

See- THAT is what I was talking about! That was the point that I was trying to make with Charles Chandler in the other tornado thread we had going, but there wasn't any data to support the sustained current flow.

Hey Mike!

I remember the discussion very well, as I could not have developed a complete and accurate theory of tornadoes without it. I had looked at such currents, and wasn't satisfied that they were responsible for tornadoes, and I spent some time working up some other angles. I learned a lot, but still couldn't put all of the pieces together. When I reconsidered the influence of a tornadic current, it all clicked. That's why you're listed in the Acknowledgments on my website. But it's not the same kind of current as the standard EU explanation.

As I understand the EU position, the electric current is between the cloud (or some place even higher than that) and the ground. If that were true, then you could invoke ohmic heating as the energy source in the updraft, and you might even get away with throwing in some Lorentz force to assist the angular momentum of the vortex, accentuating the effect.

The brick wall that the researchers hit, and which was the reason for the absence of any follow-up, was that 225 amps flowing into the ground would leave a mark, and such a mark has never been found. Given sufficient electrostatic potential to pull that much current through the air, close to the ground the lines of electric force will converge on the point of highest conductivity. It might be a tree with a nice tap root, or an iron fire hydrant, or some exposed house wiring. Whatever it is, it's going to get the 225 amps. The problem is that if "whatever it is" doesn't happen to be a cable as thick as your wrist, it's not going to handle all of that current, and it will get charred or even vaporized. And the problem with that is that this has never been observed. And you might think that such would be easy to miss in the mayhem of a tornado, but after the fact, people have to pick through all of that rubble, and somebody would have noticed this by now.

In a more general sense, if the current was between the cloud (or higher) and the ground, the tornado would favor high-conductivity features on the ground, such as rivers and railroad tracks. But in the thousands of tornado tracks that have been analyzed, no statistical preference (or deference) for ground conductivity has been observed. The number of times that a tornado follows a river or a railroad is precisely the number predicted by random chance.

These lines of reasoning seemed to refute the existence of an electric current inside tornadoes, and the research was abandoned.

Nevertheless, the data are undeniable, and just because nothing seems to make sense doesn't mean that we'll ever understand what's going on if we ignore the data. So how could 225 amps flow through the tornado, and not leave a mark on the ground?

The only possibility is that it's not flowing into the ground at all -- it's flowing into the air above the ground. There is an excess of negative charge inside the thunderstorm, and the air flowing into the tornado is positively-charged. The electric current is flowing from the cloud, through the vortex, and into the air near the ground. Ohmic heating inside the vortex does increase the updraft, and the current generates distinctive magnetic fields that are detectable from many kilometers away, and the current produces distinctive RF interference. In rare cases the current is sufficient to generate a glow discharge inside the tornado, and this has been photographed. The sustained crackling and hissing noises that have been heard coming from a vortex that hasn't touched down yet are the same sounds you'd hear from a high-voltage line discharging into the surrounding air. So it all makes sense, but only if you assume that the discharge is between the cloud and the air below the cloud, and not between the cloud and the ground.

So I'm not denying the existence of the current at all -- its presence is central to the construct I'm now using. I'm just saying that the standard EU position is oversimplified.

Cheers!