Lightning : Understanding how clouds pickup charge

Factual Questions
1

I have always read good explanations of how lightning happens and how the discharges effect atmospheric chemistry, etc. etc.

However, a few years back, I dug into it and there seemed to very little understanding of how clouds pickup charges and there were no predictive models to predict the charge on a cloud that has been observed from its inception from a satellite.

Has this changed in recent years ? Can we predict the charge on a cloud based on its history/size ?

2

Wouldn’t the history of a cloud be a very short thing? How would they monitor individual clouds?

I’m pretty sure it’s still just mostly one of those mysteries of the natural world.
Oh, I do remember reading that there was some confirmation of the theory that cosmic rays help instigate lightning by some study that found a correlation when picking up cosmic rays on some sort of radar

3

Eh, you lose an electron here and you lose an electron there. Sooner or later, it adds up and you need to equalize the charge.

4

lets look to more easily observable effects

  1. Helicopter hovering above water… it can accumulate a static charge… far worse than when its above dry land. What does this show ? The air flow on the water is causing the charge… (Its like the nylon on ebony )
  2. On really dry days, your own body can accumulate the static charge, but not on ordinary humidity days What does this show ? the humid air can discharge the static electricity…

3 What do you observe in the sky ? You don’t get lightning from clouds moving in gently. You get it from the front (which also causes tornados and rain and so on.), from the summer storm cell (or thermals ), and from the winter wind storms.

So there conditions have to be right to form the static charge on the cloud (or helicopter.)

It seems to me the air below the cloud has to be dry enough that the charge won’t dissipate slowly.
This occurs even when it is raining, this sort of storm is where there is a higher cloud that is producing the rain - the air at ground level isn’t too wet. The falling rain may help trigger lighting to the ground, which maybe why its observed together (rain and cloud to ground lightning seem to be together. When there are lightning bolts, the rain is not far away.)

5

I thought it was from vigorously rubbing clouds on your head.

6

But what triggers the electron loss? And what controls the interval between"here" and there", and thus the duration before the discharge threshold?

7

You are not far off as I have been given to understand.

It is the fast movement of all the stuff in suspension in the atmosphere that is rubbing & bouncing against each other in the fast moving air currents of storm clouds. IIRC.

Why, when, where? Big distance needs lots of potential to build high potentials, huge variation in possible paths to neutralize difference in potential.

Could to cloud is very common also… etc., etc., etc.

( I have been given bad info before so … ) :cool: