Does electrostatic charge keep a cloud up?
"Falk Tannhäuser" 3rote
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Szczepan Bialek schrieb:
Anyway cloud must discharge the voltage before fall down as rain.
Really? One can regularly observe rain, both convective or stratiform,
falling down without any previous lightning.
The discharge phenomenon occurs not always with sparks. In the wet air it is
wery fast without the sparks. Nature use sparks (lightning) in the extremal
conditions only.
Anyway, since cloud and ground are oppositely charged (otherwise you would
not get discharges in the form of C-G lightning),
The ground and clouds are both negatively charged (exces of electrons).
Different is the voltage.
the electrostatic force would *attract* cloud droplets towards the
ground, so they would fall faster *before* the discharge.
The electrostatic force repulse cloud droplets towards the sky.
However, this force is several orders of magnitude weaker than the force
exercised by gravitation and air currents.
It depends from the chrge and the altitude
S*
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