But.....
Posted by
B-Lowcountry on 7/17/2009, 8:54 pm
I thought it was "accepted science" that the storm acted like a capacitor, but whereas the charge is built as a static charge (the same way you would charge yourself when scuffling across the floor with socks on in the winter) by friction of the ice/hail/dust in the cloud tops and not so much by trapping other sources of free electrons.
The winds rub the ice together and the water/dust molecules shed their valance electrons. Those electrons then negatively charge one region of the cloud differently than the other (or another nearby cloud/ground). This achieved two things. One, it naturally repelled those molecules of like charge away (and towards opposite charge) causing an increase in friction, more shed electrons, greater repulsion, and on and on in an avalanche until 2) the potential difference achieves some critical threshold, then...ZAP!
This explained why the instances of cloud-to-cloud lightning and cloud-to-ionosphere strikes are more frequent than ground-to-cloud strikes. Also, this explains why there aren't many strikes in ordinary rain storms; the cloud tops are not high enough to have precipitable water as ice to shed those electrons.
What I don't get is what other tropical storms in the hemisphere have to do with the amount of valance electrons available in any particular storm. |
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B-Lowcountry,
7/16/2009, 8:40 pm Post A Reply
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