Month: September 2022

The arrival of corals and clownfish. View in LinkedIn

TINY CHARGES SUM. “The charge on aerosol particles and droplets in weakly electrified clouds can arise from the presence of the vertical ionosphere-earth current density in the global electric circuit causing accumulation of charge in the conductivity gradient at the interface between the cloudy air and the clear air.” https://lnkd.in/dHtJZsW View in LinkedIn

GLOBAL ELECTRIC CIRCUIT. "The voltage difference between ground and ionosphere is 200,000 to 500,000 volts (200 to 500 kV). Even in fair weather, a slight current of 2 pA (picoamps, or 0.0000000000001 A) flows from every square meter of ground upward to the ionosphere. Thunderstorms alone send 1 A of current skyward. Indeed, the flash rate for a storm is directly related to its current flow. While this view is widely accepted, it has not been proven by hard data." https://lnkd.in/d5yqMSG View in LinkedIn

CHARGE AND WEATHER. “In general the effects of electroscavenging appear capable of affecting precipitation in cold and warm clouds, and affecting cloud lifetime and cloud cover. The ionosphere-earth current density has day-to-day and decadal and centennial time-scale variations and there are changes in atmospheric dynamics and temperature and cloud cover that correlate with these variations.” https://lnkd.in/dHtJZsW View in LinkedIn

DROPLET CHARGES. “There are extensive measurements showing typically several hundred elementary charges on droplets, generally positive at cloud tops and negative at cloud base for early stages of development of clouds. Such charge accumulates from the current density flowing between ionosphere and earth as part of the global atmospheric electric circuit. When such charged droplets evaporate due to diffusion and mixing processes at cloud boundaries reducing the relative humidity, the droplet charge is retained on the residual aerosol particle.” https://lnkd.in/dHtJZsW View in LinkedIn

DROPLET CHEMISTRY. “The general effect of scavenging of any sort by cloud droplets is an accumulation of soluble and insoluble materials in droplets. These may be lost from the cloud by precipitation if the droplets grow large enough. However, in many cases mixing processes ensure that droplets that have previously gained material by scavenging simply evaporate. Then the scavenged material will be concentrated in the evaporation residues.” https://lnkd.in/dHtJZsW View in LinkedIn

CLOUD CYCLES. “Most clouds evaporate and do not precipitate, and that aerosol particles and water in the atmosphere at any one time may typically undergo at least 3 cycles of condensation and evaporation. For clouds such as marine stratocumuli the initial condensation nuclei will usually be sea salt crystals.” https://lnkd.in/dHtJZsW View in LinkedIn

SEA CLOUDS. “With cycles of condensation, charging at cloud top, partial evaporation during mixing, electroscavenging and further evaporation, the tendency is for the electroscavenging to increase the salt content of the larger droplets (which as we have seen electroscavenge at faster rates) so that on evaporation of these droplets they leave even larger salt crystals than they started with.” https://lnkd.in/dHtJZsW View in LinkedIn

Quite the pigeon nest in the making at the Great Gate of Girona. View in LinkedIn

AEROSOLS. “The emerging picture is of aerosols strongly regulating the cloud cover and depth by suppressing rainout and its dynamical feedbacks, which are potent mechanisms for dissipating clouds of all depths.” https://lnkd.in/dCrqT-h View in LinkedIn