League? Um, while the Lions and Bears (proper nouns) coexist close enough to see each other at least twice a year and the Tigers and Lions live in the same city, Tigers are hardly in the same league with the Lions and Bears. ;-)
Gamma rays are the result of reactions inside a nucleus or matter-antimatter annihilation. We can exclude the 2nd explanation for now. The 1st can be fission, fusion, or radioactive decay. Of those, the first two are ... unlikely. Leaving radioactive decay as the mechanism.
I'd say you have some interesting voltages there.
And no, I don't think its a reasonable explanation for meaningful generation of gamma rays.
Jon
Neutrons from fusion reactions in lightning have been detected
"... The DYAIZA facility developed at the Institute and installed in Moscow at the Vorobyevy Hills repeatedly recorded neutron emission peaks during thunderstorms, their magnitude exceeding that of the background by hundreds of times. Several important conclusions can be drawn from the above effort. Firstly, this helps to solve a long-standing puzzle: why cosmonauts on board the MIR space station observed high neutron background in the area of the equator. Keeping in mind that thunderstorms permanently burst out in this region, it is easy to guess where high neutron background comes from..."
-- Dirk http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff
(1) I don't see a peer-reviewed paper here. (2) The article uses terms like "proves" (from no evidence so far as I can see) which suggests it was written more for splash than meaning. (3) It's the result of Informnauka Agency and prepared by journalists from the Russian 'Chemistry and Life' magazine -- which is roughly about like "Popular Science" might be here, I'd guess. Not a necessary source of rock-solid science. (4) If high voltage within __natural__ conditions were sufficient for fusion, I'd imagine developing fusion power wouldn't require so many unnatural approaches. (5) I cannot find the Kuzhevsky's concepts discussed at universities. (6) I do find his name and discussion coupled to whacko web sites -- which say only that the article you cite is being enjoyed by many tin-foil-hat folks -- but it also doesn't help his case. (7) The article says "repeatedly recorded neutron emission peaks during thunderstorms" but says nothing about the conclusions about sources of them -- only that the author from the popular science group apparently thinks its confirmation -- the energies of the neutrons aren't mentioned and knowing that is vital for assigning sources to them.
Do you have anything better than this?
Jon
You are much to kind, presuming he has any point beyond defending IPCC' AGW political agenda.
One thing I would like to add: Jetliners are cloud triggers at higher altitudes when relative humidity is borderline able to form clouds.
Occaisionally, as in a few hours per year, I see significant cloud cover triggered by jetliners - and I live and work (substantially outdoor day job) where plenty fly at altitudes where cirrus clouds form.
Cosmic rays mostly don't get to altitudes much below that.
Another common range of altitudes where clouds start forming is where cumulus clouds start forming - generally about .6 to 2.5 km above surface, depending on relative humidity at the surface. Over land in continental humid and semi-arid areas, this is usually in/near the 1-2 km range. Darn few cosmic rays get down that far. If some factor changes ability of water vapor to condense for those clouds, then usually thermals would merely have to go up a few more or a few less tens of meters to achieve cloud formation. And once a cumulus cloud forms, any water droplets that had to form supercooled (with respect to dew point) grow quickly and release latent heat of condensation, and the cumulus cloud grows to where it would be if there were more condensation nuclei.
Furthermore, our atmosphere now has no shortange of microdroplets of sulfuric acid solution, which are nice condensation nuclei - those are already droplets of a mixture including water. Those grow when relative humidity increases, and grow bigtime when relative humidity gets close to
100%. Sometimes those produce slightly visible light fog where a cumulus cloud is about to begin forming.- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)
Let's see how cloud cover fares. I would expect a bit of a downturn in insolation anyway from now to 2030 or into the 2030's on basis of an 80 year cycle of solar activity that I heard of.
Furthermore, the 60-65 year "multidecadal oscillation" appears to me to have recently entered its "global_peak-to-global_dip" half cycle, which I think should oppose global warming until approaching that cycle's bottom, and it appears to me that one's "bottom" should be mid-2030's, though may be close enough to bottom by the mid 2020's to 2030 to have trouble countering any warming trend past that time.
Should we have any significant global warming at all in the next 20 years when both the 80 year solar cycle and the 60-65 year "multidecadal oscillation" say we should be cooling, then watch out for what happens from 2030 to the 2060's or 2070 or so! That could mean 3 decades warming .25-.3 degree C per decade, for .75-.9 degree warmer than wherever 2030 was - should 2030 be to any significant extent warmer (like .5-.6 C above 1961-1990 average) than the roughly .4 degree C above 1961-1990 average that the decade after the spike of the 1998 El Nino achieved. Such a scenario that I suspect being likely means to me 2070 having surface/surface_level_troposphere 1.25-1.5 degree C warmer than 1961-1990 average.
- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)
I took a look.
That article only claims detection of extra neutron presence over Earth's equator. Meanwhile, most of Earth's lightning occurs in the more intense extratropical thunderstorms, which are disproportionately over USA.
Meanwhile, that article mentions 2.45 MeV as energy that these neutrons have, while failing to say how any fusion reaction in Earth's atmosphere results. Temperature in the core of a lightning stroke is roughly ballpark in eV terms maybe about 10 eV, probably even less, maybe more like a couple eV. Xenon flashlamps have arc temperature in eV terms, even for the free electrons, around .6 eV give-or-take a bit (I suspect some push .8 or maybe 1 eV).
- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)
that was a speculation om ny part, there's no other high energy sources up there - I guess it's possible that some process cocentrates radioactive particles, or there's fusion.
The thing is as the lightning bolt forms, first there's a trace leader where electrons are stripped from the air particles forming a positively charged ionised path, this happens because electrons have a much lower mass than the air particles - so the ions stay pretty-much still while the electrons rush away unntil the trace leader grows far enough to reach the negative ions not much current flows.
, and then there's there's the main stroke where electrons flood into positive-ion pathway.
as they do this it becomes much more conductive as electrons are over
1000 ties more mobile than even the smallest ions.as as they near the end of their path the voltage gradient rises the remaining ionised sections grows greatly.
maybe it gets high enough,
if it does x rays would probably also be observed at the ground end of groundstrikes.
another thing, all the data I've seen suggests a fairly smooth distribution of energy, don't gammas come in certain sizes dependant on the subatomic event?
to me this suggests these are X rays, not gammas.
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The initiator could also be an ultra high energy relativistic cosmic ray and its secondary particles. They have been a few observed with energies in a single (probably iron) nucleus that roughly correspond to a well thrown cricket ball. They are more common than you might think. .
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It may be a mechanism not unlike the ones being considered for small scale accelerators using the difference in mass between electrons and nuclei in a plasma to create a very large EMP transient potential gradient for a short time. There is a fair amount of info on cosmic ray showers in the atmosphere and their methods of detection.
Is a reasonable introduction.
Regards, Martin Brown
That is an article appearing to me after a few minutes of reading to propose correlation between some factor in Earth's magnetic field and low latitude precipitation.
Meanwhile, it appears to me that low latitude precipitation should have some good correlation with any or some or most of the "Milankovitch Cycles". I wonder if any of those also influences Earth's magnetic field (especially precession and/or eccentricity_of_Earth's_orbit, though I suspect precession above all others).
- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)
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