Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe,
brought to you by The Thunderbolts Project
at Thunderbolts.info
In his previous Space News interview Thunderbolts contributor Andrew Hall
offered his insights on a new model for lightning on Earth,
based on the understanding that our planet's atmosphere is a giant electric circuit.
While mainstream science certainly recognizes extraordinary electrical phenomena on Earth,
the real cause of such phenomena remains hypothetical,
with many remaining mysteries.
In this episode Hall further explores the new Electric Universe perspective
on extreme earthly weather.
Hall: In a previous episode of Space News
we talked about Nature's Electrode,
how cold plasma corona is the proper electronic model for a lightning genesis,
and how mechanisms for ionization in a thunderstorm work.
Now let's take in the bigger picture to get a more coherent look at a thunderstorm.
The proper electrical analogy for a supercell storm is a thermopile.
A thermopile is an electrical circuit you’ve probably seen in use:
ice coolers made for cars that plug into the cigarette lighter are one example.
Thermocouples are an instrument to measure temperature
used in your car and home air conditioning and heating units.
The thermocouple is a circuit that couldn't be simpler.
All it takes is two or more wires of different conductivity, connected in series.
The effect can also be made with solid state materials similar to a solar cell.
The different electrical properties of the dissimilar wires create a temperature difference
- one conductor chills and the other heats up in the presence of current;
or vice versa, current is produced by a temperature difference in the wires.
Now hold that thought for a moment.
Current is produced by a temperature difference.
Temperature is wholly a consequence of electrodynamics.
There are all kinds of complexities about temperature and radiation
and how it's transported by conduction and convection,
but the bottom line is electricity.
There are 3 mathematical relationships that describe the conversion of current to heat
and heat to current in terms of a circuit,
called the Seebeck, Peltier and Thomson effects.
The details aren't needed for this discussion
because they describe different conditions and aspects of the same thing.
Current produces heat and heat produces current,
provided the right dissimilar materials are properly arranged in the circuit.
The relevance to a thunderhead is in the central updraft core of the storm,
which becomes a thermocouple circuit.
It's a flow of wind bearing ionic matter which produces a current.
In “Nature’s Electrode” we discussed several mechanisms for how ions form a cold plasma corona
by virtue of field emissions in a strong electric field.
The updraft rapidly chills as it rises,
becoming more saturated with condensate and ionization.
It also shrinks.
The central updraft column gets denser as it rises,
so the column has to shrink in volume, and this causes it to speed up.
The many changes to the state of the air in the updraft
changes the conductivity of the air in the column.
The updraft column is electrically no different than a wire of changing conductivity,
which in the presence of current, will exhibit a thermo-electric effect.
It won't maybe do it, it's going to do it.
It has to do it!
In the presence of a huge electric field,
a wet surface wind rising into the cold dry stratosphere
is going to cause a whopper electric current.
If anyone doubts this go look at a thunderstorm.
When there is a sequence of several conductors of different conductivity in series,
the thermo-electric effect can be amplified by adding more junctions.
This is called a thermo-pile.
It's several thermocouples connected together.
A supercell thunderstorm is a thermo-pile.
It has more than one ionization event
and each one changes the column’s conductivity in a feedback
that increases current and amplifies ionization.
The rising central updraft ionizes where the moisture is saturating and condensing,
or freezing at specific temperature layers.
All around the column is a shear zone between it and the surrounding air,
and this is where the ions go to collect.
The shear zone is an interface
- a dielectric barrier that attracts charged species to it.
Again let's refer back to our previous discussion of “Nature's Electrode”:
we discussed how ionization occurs at different altitudes
as the moisture in the air condenses, supersaturates and freezes.
It's been known since the beginning of the 20th century,
that a fast-moving charged particle will cause sudden condensation of water along its path.
In 1911 Charles Wilson used this principle to devise the cloud chamber
so he could photograph the tracks of fast-moving electrons.
In 2007 Henrik Svensmark published a theory on galactic cosmic rays’ influence on cloud formation
and later demonstrated his theory in a cloud chamber at CERN,
demonstrating certain cloud formations are catalyzed
by cosmic rays ionizing the atmosphere.
These are examples of ionization causing condensation.
Now let's consider condensation causing ionization.
Water vapor condensing into droplets self- ionizes into cations and anions.
In the huge electric field of a thunderstorm the ions are torn apart as they form,
filling the rising air with charged species.
This condensation event forms the first corona,
a negative corona around the central updraft
with charge density concentrated in the lower clouds where condensation first occurs.
Above 1% volume of charged species the air will exhibit the dynamics of a plasma.
Plasma acts as a coherent fluid organized by the electromagnetic field.
It seeks balance in an equipotential layer transverse to the electric field,
so it spills out from the walls of the column and forms sheets
which is what is detected in thunderstorms: “sheets” of charged species.
They actually have more complex geometry than a “sheet”.
They organize into plasma currents
that actively spit out electrons and ions in channeled currents.
Coronas have a geometry and produce effects
that depend on the polarity of the charged species mix.
The channels of discharge they create
explain every aspect of a supercell thunderstorm.
Coronas explain rain, downdrafts, tornadoes and lightning.
They explain cloud-to-ground lightning and positive lightning;
intra-cloud lightning and inter-cloud lightning.
They explain sprites, elves and gnomes - electrical discharges to space
that are the Earth's equivalent to a solar flare caused by the same thing – corona.
They explain the shape of wall clouds, beavertails, the mesocyclone, and anvil.
Because this is the electric model of a thunderstorm it's closer to the truth.
It's not that convection doesn't occur, it does.
But convection is heat transfer and that is fundamentally electric,
like everything else.
Pressure and temperature are intimately related as physical expressions of electrodynamics.
The anvil top is another coronal expression where water freezes into ice.
The ionic mix here is different and a positive corona is the result.
It has a different shape, being a broad diameter and less dense in terms of charge density.
The coronas are the thermopile’s different current junctions,
where charge bleeds out of the central updraft column,
just as it will from a power line if the insulation is damaged.
The atmosphere is a leaky insulator.
It's the strength of the electromagnetic field that gives the storm its shape.
And once the motor gets started,
the conveyor belt of wet wind in the updraft keeps revving as charge density builds.
The rain curtain and downdraft
are the same current looping and dumping hydrolyzed charge
in the form of rain at the exhaust of the updraft.
It's a looping current from ground to atmosphere, and back to ground,
in a continuously changing conductive path through several temperature regimes
- in other words, it's a thermopile circuit.
And so builds the strength of the corona
until it spits electrons that avalanche into lightning bolts.
If conditions are right, a charged corona will lower towards the ground,
abating its lightning to send downwards a twisting tendril of plasma,
while stirring ground winds below into a vortex.
A tornado is born of a corona.
In this diagram, a point electrode generates a corona
opposed to a plate electrode connected to ground, with a gap in between.
This is a similar circuit to a storm except the corona in the clouds
would not have the geometry of a point electrode,
but likely a flattened toroidal shape.
In the region in the gap labeled ”drift”,
channels of current are created based on the charge density
of the region of corona from which it radiates.
The outer edge is were charge density and electric field tension is lowest,
the corona can't make lightning,
but it still spits electrons that drift down towards the ground.
The drift region of a corona creates unipolar winds
as drifting electrons drag ions and neutral matter along by electrokinesis.
Sudden and intense downbursts and mammatus clouds
are highly mysterious to atmospheric scientists
and they attribute them to density bombs
- pockets of dense heavy air that rapidly sink from the clouds.
These violent downdrafts will slap airliners from the sky.
They aren't density bombs though
- they are unipolar winds and ionizing tufts from the anvil corona.
The entire morphology of a thunderstorm
is explained by a thermopile circuit with leaky insulation.
But that isn’t all it is.
In Electric Earth theory there is a more significant meaning.
The looping circuit of a supercell
is a weak form of electrical expression known as a coronal loop.
Coronal loops are the result of the coronas themselves
moving relative to the plate electrode: the earth.
The differential movement creates an offset
between the center of charge density in the sky
versus the center of charge density on the ground, distorting the electric field.
It's like a dog chasing a cat that can never catch up
- negative chasing positive polarity in a wave.
The result is it bends the current into a loop.
It goes up in a wind-borne discharge of current and comes down,
energy expended and recombined into rain.
If charge builds enough, though, the loop breaks out into fully realized discharge.
The current breaks through the dielectric barrier of the atmosphere
to splash charge into space.
On the Sun we call them Solar Flares and Coronal Mass Ejections.
On Earth we call them sprites, elves and gnomes.
So, here we are in the world of plasma.
Double layers, Alfven waves, z-pinches and corona.
It happens in our everyday lives as much as it does on the surface of the Sun,
because it's all the same thing.
So too, we have symmetry.
Not the artificial symmetry of mathematical equations and categories
consensus science keeps force fitting to Nature,
but Nature’s true symmetry of nested harmonic repetition.
Such organization and harmonic resonance between phenomena across all orders of scale
is not the result of random anything.
It's the result of electricity.
The same phenomena is found on any planetary body
that carries an internal current that forms an electromagnetic field.
The coronal loops are ultimately caused by the voltage
between the magnetosphere and the telluric currents below Earth’s crust,
just as they occur above and below the photosphere of the Sun
and in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn and Venus.
The electrical stress across the layers of atmosphere and crust
is charge building on layers of dielectric,
which is what a capacitor is.
A storm is an expression of capacitor discharge.
Tornadoes are a harmonic fractal repetition of the supercell storm as a whole.
They are nested coronal loops inside the bigger loop of the storm.
Because they are smaller and generate from an intense charge density region of the corona,
the energy is more concentrated.
Look again at the image of the solar coronal loop
and see there is a smaller bright loop of higher intensity.
This is the effect of an embedded harmonic repetition
and that is what a tornado is to the storm it's born from.
But as always, it's more complicated than that.
So we'll delve deeper into tornadoes next time to complete the picture of a thunderstorm.
Thank you.
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