A couple of songs from Dire Straits before class this afternoon ("Down to the Waterline" and "Lady Writer")
The 1S1P Assignment #3 reports on Fog, Foucault's Pendulum, Atmospheric Stability, and Regional Winds have all been graded and were returned today. Reports on the last topic (Rainbows, Mirages, and the Green Flash) were collected today.
You can always turn in late 1S1P reports. I'll decide what to do with them later. There's a good chance that you might only receive half credit on late reports.
Lightning kills just under 100 people every year in the United States (more than tornadoes or hurricanes but less than flooding, summer heat and winter cold) and is the cause of about 30% of all power outages. In the western United States, lightning starts about half of all forest fires. Lightning caused fires are a particular problem at the beginning of the thunderstorm season in Arizona. At this time the air underneath thunderstorms is still relatively dry. Rain falling from a thunderstorm will often evaporate before reaching the ground. Lightning then strikes dry ground, starts a fire, and there isn't any rain to put out or at least slow the spread of the fire. This is so called dry lightning.
Lighning is most commonly produced by thunderstorms (it has also be observed in dust storms and volcanic eruptions such as the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland).
A typical summer thunderstorm in Tucson is shown in the figure above (p. 165 in the photocopied ClassNotes). Even on the hottest day in Tucson in the summer a large part of the middle of the cloud is found at below freezing temperatures and contains a mixture of super cooled water droplets and ice crystals. This is where precipitation forms and is also where electrical charge is created. Doesn't it seem a little unusual that electricity can be created in such cold and wet conditions?
Collisions between precipitation particles produce the electrical charge needed for lightning. When temperatures are colder than -15 C (above the dotted line in the figure above), graupel becomes negatively charged after colliding with a snow crystal. The snow crystal is positively charged and is carried up toward the top of the cloud by the updraft winds. At temperature warmer than -15 (but still below freezing), the polarities are reversed. A large volume of positive charge builds up in the top of the thunderstorm. A layer of negative charge accumulates in the middle of the cloud. Some smaller volumes of positive charge are found below the layer of negative charge. Positive charge also builds up in the ground under the thunderstorm (it is drawn there by the large layer of negative charge in the cloud).
Air is normally an insulator, but when the electrical attractive forces between these charge centers gets high enough lightning occurs. Most lightning (2/3 rds) stays inside the cloud and travels between the main positive charge center near the top of the cloud and a large layer of negative charge in the middle of the cloud; this is intracloud lightning (Pt. 1). About 1/3 rd of all lightning flashes strike the ground. These are called cloud-to-ground discharges (actually negative cloud-to- ground lightning). We'll spend most of the class learning about this particular type of lightning (Pt. 2)
A couple of interesting things can happen at the ground when the electrical forces get high enough. Attraction between positive charge in the ground and the layer of negative charge in the cloud can become strong enough that a person's hair will literally stand on end (see two photos below). This is incidentally a very dangerous situation to be in as lightning might be about to strike.
St. Elmo's Fire (corona discharge) is a faint electrical discharge that sometimes develops at the tops of elevated objects during thunderstorms. The link will take you to a site that shows corona discharge. Have a look at the first 3 pictures, they probably resemble St. Elmo's fire. The remaining pictures are probably different phenomena. St. Elmo's fire was first observed coming from the tall masts of sailing ships at sea (St. Elmo is the patron saint of sailors).
Positive polarity cloud to ground lightning (Pt. 3) accounts for a few percent of lightning discharges. Upward lightning is the rarest form of lightning (Pt. 4). We'll look at both of these unusual types of lightning later in the lecture.
Most cloud to ground discharges begin with a negatively-charged downward-moving stepped leader (the figure above is on p. 166 in the ClassNotes). A developing channel makes its way down toward the cloud in 50 m jumps that occur every 50 millionths of a second or so. Every jump produces a short flash of light (think of a strobe light dropped from an airplane that flashes on and off as it falls toward the ground). The sketch below shows what you'd see if you were able to photograph the stepped leader on moving film. Every 50 microseconds or so