Emissions make storms more dangerous

Emissions make storms more dangerous. In particular, emissions from ships at sea make storms carry more lightning than expected.

More thunderstorms due to emissions from human activities. Photo: Farmers' Almanac.

US scientists have found that ship emissions are causing more thunderstorms, Popular Science reported today. In areas with heavy maritime activity, the number of thunderstorms is twice as high as normal.

The injection of tiny particles into the atmosphere can create thunderstorms with lightning. Lightning forms in clouds containing ice, liquid water, and moving air currents. As heavy ice particles, called flint, move downward due to gravity, smaller snow particles move upward with the air currents, colliding with each other and causing an electrical discharge.

Soft ice is generally negatively charged, while snowflakes are positively charged. They collide and cause an electrical discharge, which is what creates lightning. Lightning is more likely to occur if ideal conditions, such as clouds containing water, ice particles, and snow crystals, are present more frequently.

Aerosols are small particles of liquid or solid matter such as water vapor, smoke, and dust that contribute to cloud formation. If the air is too clean, with few aerosols, then cloud particles are less likely to form.

Clouds become larger and heavier as they absorb water from the surrounding air. As a result, they fall more quickly, creating rain without lightning. In other words, the small particles in the air are what cause thunderstorms to bring so much lightning.

Scientists are studying how the activities that create these particles, such as cars, ships, and factories emitting gases, affect the formation of lightning. In 2004, Robert Holzworth at the University of Washington began creating a sensor system called the Global Lightning Locating System.

Ship exhaust adds particulate matter to the air. Photo: Hoyer Motors.

“Every time there’s lightning, there’s interference in the radio waves in the atmosphere,” says Joel Thornton, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “If you put sensors in places where they can detect interference, then when they detect interference at different times, you can analyze it, compare it, and pinpoint where the lightning occurred.”

Katrina Virts, a researcher at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, created a lightning map after studying this data.

“Virts pointed out two lines that looked like shipping lanes,” Thornton said. They quickly discovered that lightning was more frequent in shipping lanes.

While studying aerosols and their relationship to cloud formation and lightning, Thornton realized that the catalyst was particles from ship exhaust. There are a lot of particulates on land, from forest fires, dust, and pollution. But there are not many at sea.

Pumping more particulate matter into a small area of ​​normally clean air makes storms more dangerous with more lightning.

Human pollution not only has long-term effects on the climate, it can also have a direct impact on the weather. “By adding particles from ship emissions to the atmosphere, we could be turning normal rainstorms into thunderstorms,” Thornton said.

According to VNE