"Waterspout" as a result of the Ocean's Skeletal Structures and a Special Type of Atmospheric Aerosol Dusty Plasma

Abstract

An analysis of databases of photographic images of ocean's surface, taken from various altitudes and for various types of rough ocean surface, revealed the presence of an ocean's skeletal structures (OSS). We make a stress on the phenomenon of OSS's blocks in the form of vertically oriented floating cylinders (VFC) because here we suggest the hypothesis that the VFC is a stimulator of initial phase of the "waterspout" phenomenon (WS). An analysis of the fine structure of VFC suggests the OSS to be a carrier/source of major electrodynamical properties of initial phase of every WS. This implies that the main body of WS may be interpreted as a special type of atmospheric aerosol dusty plasma. In such a framework, the WS is considered as the long-lived filament, being formed in electric discharge in the presence of electric and magnetic fields in the course of electric breakdown between the cloud and ocean surface. In this case the charged water aerosol (formed by means of VFC's capillaries in the presence of very powerful electric field) may be an analog of a microdust which is lifting upward to the cloud due to effects of electrostatic forces. With such a capillary-electrostatic model of WS, it appears possible to interpret many effects related to WS. We suggest a hypothesis for dynamics of WS and a possible scenario of its transition to classical tornado.