Coarse sea spray inhibits lightning

Zengxin Pan; Feiyue Mao; Daniel Rosenfeld; Yannian Zhu; Lin Zang; Xin Lu; Joel A. Thornton; Robert H. Holzworth; Jianhua Yin; Avichay Efraim; Wei Gong

doi:10.1038/s41467-022-31714-5

Nature Communications (Aug 2022)

Coarse sea spray inhibits lightning

Zengxin Pan,
Feiyue Mao,
Daniel Rosenfeld,
Yannian Zhu,
Lin Zang,
Xin Lu,
Joel A. Thornton,
Robert H. Holzworth,
Jianhua Yin,
Avichay Efraim,
Wei Gong

Affiliations

Zengxin Pan: State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping, and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University
Feiyue Mao: State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping, and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University
Daniel Rosenfeld: State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping, and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University
Yannian Zhu: School of Atmospheric Sciences, Nanjing University
Lin Zang: School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University
Xin Lu: State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping, and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University
Joel A. Thornton: Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington
Robert H. Holzworth: Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington
Jianhua Yin: School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University
Avichay Efraim: Institute of Earth Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Wei Gong: State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping, and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31714-5
Journal volume & issue: Vol. 13, no. 1
pp. 1 – 7

Abstract

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Previous hypotheses cannot fully explain the large lightning excess over land compared to ocean. It is found that coarse sea spray that create large drops precipitates cloud water before it can freeze, thus robbing the fuel for cloud electrification

Published in Nature Communications

ISSN: 2041-1723 (Online)
Publisher: Nature Portfolio
Country of publisher: United Kingdom
LCC subjects: Science
Website: https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

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