On Sat, 11 Sep 2021, Michael Foster wrote:
William Beaty, if you're asleep at your keyboard, wake
up and help us out here. I'm pretty sure I first found a reference to
Baez's hypothesis on your website. In any case, this whole idea is right
up your alley.
Quick search for Joan Baez finds her father named Abert, not Alfred!
I haven't heard of Baez tornado stuff, but I do remember a 1990s theory
where tornades are electrically powered by ground-surface generation of
charged droplets.
Years later this finally started making sense to me, mostly after I
realized that we are all taught the wrong definition of "conductor." A
conductive material is not a path for current, instead it's a material
which CONTAINS CHARGE, e.g. the mobile charge-sea of metals, or the mobile
+Na -Cl ions of human bodies and damp soil, etc.
That means that a single electron **IS** a conductor.
So is a single ion, or a charged droplet suspended in air. Apply a
voltage (an e-field) and then the charged object starts drifting (which
causes electric current.) Just one charged dust-mote in space will serve
as a conductor, while a row of charged motes becomes a wire. And,
high-voltage famously creates dark silent conductive paths, whenever a
strong e-field contacts a wet surface, producing little Taylor Cones and
"spitting" phenomena, where jets of charged liquid droplets are ejected
from the surface.
We see this in EHT oil jets from transformer DC tanks, oil-droplet
spiderweb effect, electrospray systems and electrospinning, etc.
So, place a damp planetary surface under a thunderstorm, and all sorts of
opposite-charged droplets will be launched upwards. Add some winds, and
we'd also see electrically charged dust moving upwards (as tiny motes
leave the highly-charged ground surface under the storm clouds.)
If a vertical jet of droplet/dust should assemble itself, it would act as
a weird sort of electric discharge, like dark silent lightning.
But more probable, an existing dust-devil with its vertical core-flow, if
placed under a neg-charged T-storm, would exhibit a vertical electric
current, as the inductively-charged ground surface starts spewing out
pos-charged dust and droplets. The dust devil hoovers up the pos-charged
material, and soon becomes a fluid-based electrostatic motor, with the two
"stator plates" being the ground and the thunderstorm, and a columnar flow
of charged fluid moving upwards. (Then after some time, it may become
enclosed by negative raindrops, neg charges driven down from above.)
Would we detect immense voltages surrounding tornades? Not if they
exhibit the above coax-cable effect or "beam-cancellation," with a coaxial
distribution of opposite charges. Any e-field sensors would need to pass
through the tornado's path, in order to avoid the shielding layer of
opposite coaxial charge.
There was one paper where the authors pulled magnetometer data from many
small weather stations near the path of major tonadoes. They used the
b-field distortions to estimate the vertical electric currents in the
tornado, and found hundreds of amperes. (It was all ignored of course.
Mention electrostatic tornado-drive on sci.geo.meteorology, and the
experts become triggered, flying into rage! Only Bernard Vonnegut dared
approach this problem ...and he thought that there were no electrostatic
motor-forces, just electrical air-heating from the vertical amperes...)
As, by whatever means, the eye of a hurricane becomes more highly
charged it would attract the uncharged or oppositely charged water
droplets from outside the eye at an accellerated rate, thus making both
the radial and linear velocity very high. So, if it's the cause or the
effect can remain the subject of debate. Or perhaps it's both, one thing
feeding the other.
Research aircraft penetrating hurricane eye-walls find enormous electrical
fields, and arrays of vertical vortices. If Hurricanes are electric
motors, are they just thunderstorms with emergent tornadoes arrayed to
dance around an insulating central cylinder? Or instead perhaps your
typhoon is trying to short out the planetary vertical e-field (and so
would be driven by all of Earth's thunderstorms. In that case we could
switch off a hurricane by shorting out the ionosphere and removing the
vertical e-field. For other consequences of ionosphere-shorting, see the
SF book SIVA! by Walt Richmond. )
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3782250-siva
It might be that a fleet of these new electrostatic drones launched
around the tropical depression could cause rainfall from the moist air
Or, much easier to place some asymmetrical conditions in its path and
GUIDE hurricanes away from coastal cities. Or, guide them towards
selected cities unless we agree to pay Dr. Evil his one MIIIIIILLLLION
DOLLARS!
(((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (O) ) ) ) ) ))))))))))))))))
William J. Beaty http://staff.washington.edu/wbeaty/
beaty, chem washington edu Research Engineer
billb, amasci com UW Chem Dept, Bagley Hall RM74
x3-6195 Box 351700, Seattle, WA 98195-1700
