As look as we have Sal no development

[Guest]

Africa is the most struck place on earth. That causes huge electrical currents to run from the ionosphere, and the ionosphere (lower), then, is conductive with greater positive charge and the relative positive charges runs with ease in the conductive ionosphere in all directions. Eventually, these charges couple with the conductive Indian Ocean, Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Oceans. There, static fields allow the energy involved to play itself out relative to cloud microphysics.

There is an important quality of water vapor/clouds to consider. Water compared to air has a high dielectric constant. What that means is displacement currents don't travel well through the non conductive medium between conductive plates in a capacitive circuit. English? If there are positive charges in the ionosphere, those charges cannot flow directly to the ocean. However, since the ocean is conductive, negative charges are attracted to the ocean surface to match the positive charges in the ionosphere. This is said to be a relationship which is 180 degrees out of phase. Opposing charges attract--so if the ionosphere is relatively positive, the ocean below gets relatively negative, and so forth. What the dielectric constant means to this relationship is the higher the constant, the more difficult it is to communicate these field relationships. So, under a high water content region, even if the ionosphere has a relatively high positive charge, it doesn't couple real well with the ocean below. And cloud microphysics are not impacted per the China paper.

So as the water in the air roll off the west coast of Africa, there is a start of an organization that is reinforced on either side of Africa by the electrical characteristic of the dielectric constant. Moreover, the most intense couplings can occur where the oceans are most conductive, and that occurs in the tropics. These couplings cause asymmetries in the super cooled water droplets in the air, due to the ion content in the droplets, and make condensation difficult. Then, water vapor which was not used in that location tends to diffuse toward the regions already protected by cloud cover.

North of the thunderstorm lines over Africa, in the Sahara, the couples all but make convection impossible. The air subsists, it does not support convection, and high pressures tend to exist. The air drys, and if laden with dust, it is not washed out of the air by convective activity.

In my view the dust entrainment issue or SAL is indeed a cause of the strength of the ITCZ. For certain, the dust content does impact nucleation and convection, and that indeed points to idea of a living earth. For, before there were cells, particles that were not dust, but nucleotide complexes, also had the ability to influence cloud behaviors, only in a CALCULATED manner. In this epoch, life has become larger in that respect, whether we are talking about diatoms, molds, soot and other particles that find themselves cloud nucleation particles in tropical storm cirrus. However, the fact that the air is dry is electrically significant as well, so there has to be a way to sort out what is due to dust and what is due to electrical conditions, on a living earth.

[bvigal]

and yet another kind of dust for us, volcanic ash!

http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/VAAC/ARCHIVE/SO ... 71300.html