A model study of corona emission from hydrometeors
Vicki Schroeder, M. B. Baker, John Latham
Abstract
The maximum measured electric fields in thunderclouds are an order of magnitude less than the fields required for electric breakdown of the air. One explanation for lightning initiation in these low fields is that electric breakdown first occurs at the surfaces of raindrops where the ambient field is enhanced very locally due to the drop geometry. Laboratory experiments [Crabb & Latham, 1974] indicate that colliding raindrops which coalesce to form elongated water filaments can produce positive corona in ambient fields close to those measured in thunderclouds. We calculate the E-field distribution around a simulated coalesced drop pair and use a numerical model to study the positive corona mechanisms in detail. Our results give good agreement with the laboratory observations. At the altitudes (and thus low pressures) at which lightning initiation is observed, our results show that positive corona can occur at observed in-cloud E-fields.
Create a lesson
Related papers
Morphology-based retrieval of local wave parameters and phase shifts in satellite-observed atmospheric disturbances
Yuriy Klymenko, Alla Fedorenko, Evgen Kryuchkov et al.
Parametric wave spectrum models for prediction of Stokes drift profiles
W. Erick Rogers, Yalin Fan, Luis Zamudio et al.
Evaluating LLMs for Translating Legacy Fortran Atmospheric Physics to GPU-Accelerated JAX
Iris Linck, John Dennis, John Schreck et al.
legoESM: a modular, differentiable, multiscale, AI-ready Earth system model built with AI agents
Pierre Gentine, Dhruv Balwada, Aytaç Paçal et al.
A Physics-Constrained Implicit Profile Network for Continuous Reconstruction of Tropical Cyclone Near-Surface Wind Profiles
Jian Ma, Yilin Yang, Robert Rogers et al.
A Graph Neural Network for Global Daily Fire Radiative Power Prediction at Medium-Range Lead Times
Li Zhang, Jun Wang, Isidora Jankov et al.