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diy solar

Global Warming = Fewer storms?

svetz

Works in theory! Practice? That's something else
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NOTE: This thread is NOT about is it caused by CO2, if it's man-made, or politics. If you want to talk about that stuff... please start your own thread.

Hopefully this is just science we can all discuss reasonably. For whatever reason, global warming is a real thing easily measured/recorded by satellites, ocean buoy's, etc. Apologies for the possibly offensive "note" above ... I just don't want the thread to get derailed by accidentally pushing anyone's button's - hopefully we're not talking about any of the more polarizing aspects.

So, this thread is about if the global weather has been getting worse with global warming. I've always heard that with global warming we can expect more storms and worse weather. It seems logical, higher temperature, more evaporation, more clouds, more rain. Certainly as weather changes some areas should see more severe weather and other areas less.

But I now suspect that at a global level, unless I've really misunderstood something, weather is overall less severe - by a lot.
Please double check my thinking here and let me know what flaws you see.

Atmospheric Electricity
This whole supposition is based on Atmospheric Electricity measurements.
We know that atmospheric electricity is the "circuit flow" between Earth and
sky that complete the lightening (i.e., severe weather) cycle.

If you're not familiar with atmospheric electricity, you can google it, check
wikipedia; personally I like Feynman. Here's an illustration that explains
the circuit -->

This is where the 100V potential difference per yard comes from (yes,
at eye level the atmospheric potential is ~200V, or rather it used to be
) and is in general pretty cool stuff every nerd should know about.
1204_mrstatic_fig1.png

Atmospheric electricity measurements have been taken for a long time and the daily cycle confirms the existence of the electrical layer at 50 km (measurements are the same, at the same time of day, at any point on the globe).

So, if the temperature increase is increasing the amount of severe weather, there should be a corresponding increase to atmospheric electricity. Instead, we get the opposite (the images are links to their source):

1594488383790.png1594489170847.png

The authors thought the decrease was from a decrease in galactic cosmic-ray flux. That doesn't jive for me for a couple of reasons, first is that their data doesn't show any increase after 2001 which was the minimum (see chart below). Second is that the reduction hardly seems like enough to have changed the air resistance, that is there still should have been plenty of ionization.

1594490057497.png
 
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The advice here has been less storms (cyclones) but when they do come they will be much worse. So far this appears to be proving true. In fact many of the predictions of what would be likely to happen, that were made 30 years ago, are coming true. What once would have been unbelievable is now accepted as how things are. Tropical ocean species are being seen much further south than they would have previously been seen as sea temperatures have risen enough to permit the east coast currents to draw warm water all the way down to the Bass Strait.

What is undeniably being seen is weather patterns are moving south, and becoming more unstable. The arid zone in Australia is year on year extending south, slowly but steadily eating into farmland in South Australia etc reducing the amount of land it is viable to farm on. Last season saw a cyclone on the east coast of Australia make it down to Sydney lattitudes, and way after the normal yearly season ended a cyclone made itself felt on the west coast.

Each year since 1970 at least 1 cyclone has crossed the QLD coast. The season just passed saw one feeble cyclone only just scrape into that class in the Gulf of Carpentaria. This is doubly interesting because the surface temperatures in the Coral Sea were abnormally high (30c, yet more bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef) dumping more vapour into the air, yet cyclone activity was greatly reduced.

Regardless of the cause, things are certainly changing.
 
... Regardless of the cause, things are certainly changing.
I agree that change is inevitable with global warming...but I really
expected the amount of lightening in the world to go up with global
warming. It just seems that lightening is a product of severe weather.

Could have knocked me over with a feather that there's half the
lightening globally in 2007 as there was in 1973. (see graph in the OP)

...I am not the weather girl....
Me either... I was sure expecting it to go the other way.

I suppose it might not even be related to global warming, AFAIK we don't
really understand what causes lightening. The only other change I can
think of that has been declining for so long is the Earth's magnetic field...
(see image to the right)
 
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Lightning interacts a surprising amount with Van Allen radiation belts, so perhaps there is something going on up there contributing to it.
 
I guess the science is changing... from 2014 [ref]:
Now, a new study finds that lightning strikes could flash through the sky even more often than that as the planet warms, at least over the continental U.S.

2018 [ref]
Most previous studies project an increase in global lightning with climate change over the coming century1,5,6,7, but these typically use parameterizations of lightning that neglect cloud ice fluxes, a component generally considered to be fundamental to thunderstorm charging8. As such, the response of lightning to climate change is uncertain.
Sadly, their model only shows a 15% decrease with 5°C increase expected by 2100.

In the meantime, the U.S. saw a decrease of 11% in lightening strikes in 2018 (ref, US national lightening strike database). I've googled to see if anyone had any theories for decreased lightening... so far just found a bunch articles confirming it is decreasing.

Lightning interacts a surprising amount with Van Allen radiation belts, so perhaps there is something going on up there contributing to it.
I've never heard of the belts affecting lightening (although I knew lightening cleared radiation [ref]):
Lightning in clouds only a few miles above the ground clears a safe zone in the radiation belts thousands of miles above the Earth, according to new NASA research.
But you could well be right as the belt's strength would weakened (allowing more radiation to pour through) as the Earth's magnetic field weakens. The drawback to that theory is (as I understand it, not to be confused with the weather girl) the belts don't weaken linearly, they weaken at the poles while the equator stays fairly strong up to the end - and of course, the really big lightening counts are around the equator. Still... you might have something there.
 
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Purely anecdotal, but what I've been seeing here in the Southwestern USA is less frequent storms with more intensity. It hasnt rained here in at least 8 weeks, but if recent trends hold true, we will soon have a 3-4" rain storm. We have had 4 "50 year storms" since 2006.

I recently made a trip to the Very Large Array site on the plains of San Augustin in New Mexico (where Contact was filmed). We hiked to the top of a mountain nearby, and I marveled at the fact that the entire valley was devoid of a single tree. The valley floor is about 6,000' feet above sea level. The reason for the complete lack of vegetation? The soil is too saline to support plant life, as it was once a sea. You can find seashells on the surface everywhere.
 
The advice here has been less storms (cyclones) but when they do come they will be much worse.
Still trying to make sense of this. We had a record number of storms, but thankfully no cat 5's this year. Hopefully one of the new members is an atmospheric scientist and can confirm/deny atmospheric electricity and lightening are decreasing ?
 
I am from Florida we have bad storms and hurricanes. I now live on the Alabama coast. Been working on the beach going on over 20 years now.

I will be 60 in a few months. We do not have a rise in water like Gore said many years ago. The same buildings on the beach that was there when I was a kid going to the beach are still there today with the same beach fronts. We do have beachfront erosion from the waves and storms and they build the beach back up but this is not a higher water level.

Working on the beach as long as we have I see not higher water level at all. You can see the same sea walls for years and no higher water at them.

We have storms all the time by the beach and always have. Some years it is less some more but not any higher amount than normal.
When we do have bad years the climate change people write stories about it like it is something getting worst but then the next year it is not and they then do not write about that.

We just got hit by hurricane Sally this year and online I could see many posts saying its all getting worse from climate change..lol
The last hurricane like that we had was 16 years ago I was in that too. Growing up I was in many hurricanes over the years nothing has changed. Some years we have more than others the same as now.
My wife and her x ran a sailboat rental business 35 years ago on the beach. You can go to that same beach today and still rent sailboats they are not underwater or even close to it.
After reading and watching a lot on the topic over the years I feel it is a huge hox. A way to get more government control and money from people.

If your job is a climate control writer or reporter then you need to create a story all the time to keep your job. You will create a story that is one-sided from your point of view. They never show the other side or that most all of that has been going on forever.

Things like showing a photo of an ICE chunk floating away and talk about how bad that is, But leave out the part saying that this happens every year at that time of year the photo was taken.
Or they show a photo of a coral reef that is dying and say how bad that is all due to climate change. But they leave out that this happens all the time and a new reef area is growing stong a mile away replacing it.

We do have a lot of pollution but that is not global warming or climate change.
 
I live in Florida. The weather channels scare me more than the storms.
There's always a spaghetti strand headed right for me and the clouds look like they're on fire. ?️
 
The thread is meant to be about the changes in atmospheric electricity which is easily measured and tied to lightening (see the OP for links).
Presumable those changes are driven by climate change (nothing stays the same forever), sun spots, or something else.

I know there's a lot of doom-sayers regarding climate change, but IMO humans adapt. I figure at some point the water rose in the city of Venice, sure lot's of folks probably cried about it... until they started making money from tourism. But if we go down that rabbit hole it'd derail the intent of the thread ?

That said, I really don't see why there's been such a dramatic drop in the amount of lightening. I know that's sort of crazy considering we don't even really know what causes lightening. I was taught cloud friction in school, more myth...truth is like so many things we just don't know. But, possibly understanding one would lead to a greater understanding of the other.
 
That is not the story of Venice. That city was built on the water.
I think the scientific community has a really good understanding of what causes lightening.
Adapt? yes. good luck with that.
You dug the rabbit hole.
 
...I think the scientific community has a really good understanding of what causes lightening....
A reference would be nice. From Wikipedia:
...The details of the charging process are still being studied by scientists...
Not an expert, but the "molecular" bumping theory was disproved a while back. I'll see if I can find a reference (esp since wikipedia still lists it).
(As I recall, the problem with a storm being like a van de graf generator was that the ions would repel rather than bump and couldn't build into a sufficient charge to generate lightening).

That is not the story of Venice. That city was built on the water.

ref:
Venice began sinking the moment it was built. From the beginning, the weight of the city pushed down on the dirt and mud that it was built on, squeezing out water and compacting the soil. This phenomenon, together with the natural movement of high tides (called acqua alta) cause periodic flooding in the city, creating a sinking sensation. Over the past 100 years, the city has sunk nine inches.
 
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The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season was the most active and the seventh costliest Atlantic hurricane season on record.



"I know that's sort of crazy considering we don't even really know what causes lightening."



 
Pretty sure the frictional charging (like a van de graf generator) was disproved not all that long ago, considering it was the predominant theory since I was in school (dinosaurs were still around) I'm not surprised there are a billion links stating it as fact. Even the NASA web site says so. Sadly, all those links are getting in the way of finding the paper I saw on it.
 
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Pretty sure that was disproved not all that long ago, considering it was the predominant theory since I was in school (dinosaurs were still around) I'm not surprised there are a billion links stating it as fact. Even the NASA web site says so. Sadly, all those links are getting in the way of finding the paper I saw on it.


If you want studies in your result use scholar.google.com


Maybe this medium article is making the rounds and giving people the impression that we don't know what causes lightning.


From the article.

“Despite over 250 years of research, how lightning begins is still a mystery,” says Ningyu Liu, a professor of physics at the University of New Hampshire Space Science Center, who makes his living by studying lightning.

Not knowing some finer details of a process is a far cry from not know how lightning is caused.



One of my favorite desktop wallpapers for years was an image of pyroclastic lightning.
 
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Rocket lightening is pretty cool too, and probably how I ran across this.
The UF lightening lab fires rockets into storms to take measurements, sort of Franklin style.

So, what you posted is the conventional theory...
...As the static charge buildup in a storm cloud increases, the electric field surrounding the cloud becomes stronger. Normally, the air surrounding a cloud would be a good enough insulator...

The paper I recall was something about how the measurements didn't show anywhere near enough charge to account for lightening, this isn't the paper I was thinking of, but is along those lines. From The physics of Lightening (2013), a UF lightening lab paper:
At the heart of the problem is the fact that decades of electric field measurements made directly inside thunderclouds have failed to find electric field strengths large enough to make a spark (according to our current understanding), even when the effects of reduced air density and the presence of water and ice particles are taken into account. And yet we routinely see very large sparks being made inside thunderclouds in the form of lightning. This suggests that there is either something wrong with our measurements or there is something wrong with our understanding
ap_methodslightning.jpg
 
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you can cite many sceintific papers, even Wiki, but a missing paper i saw someplace and maybe i remember i did understand it proves my point. Sort of like -- never mind. it is a lost cause.
 
...but a missing paper i saw someplace and maybe i remember i did understand it proves my point....
And here I thought the paper I cited in the post above yours was proof enough there was a question about the theory. But hey, I'm not an expert.
 
Thread Recap
Atmospheric Electricity (aka PG) is the other side of the "circuit" tied to lightening (see OP for details). In 2007, the PG was roughly half what is was in the 60s, so that's a lot less lightening or energy in lightening. Why the change? Unknown, could be related to climate change, lessening magnetic field, cosmic rays, or your guess here. Discovered today that aerosols affect measurements, so it could well be the station is merely measuring an increase in local air pollution.

The OP suggested it might be tied to climate change and that there might be fewer storms. Certainly if the 2020 hurricane season was anything to go by, there were more storms than usual although they were of lesser intensity. In 2014 a paper theorized more lightening as global warming continued, a 2018 paper theorizes less lightening with global warming, and the the US National lightening Strike database saw a decrease of 11% in 2018, although it's only a single data point (would be nice to have an annual chart of worldwide strikes).

Unfortunately, the PG data in the OP only went to 2007. Historically, the number of hurricanes peaked in 2007 (at least until 2020) and there were more hurricanes on average than in the 60's, so hurricanes are probably not a reliable indicator. Just a single point though, would be nice to find an annual chart of worldwide strikes.
 
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