Emissions make storms more dangerous

Emissions from ships and boats at sea make the storms carry more thunder than expected.

American scientists discovered that emissions from boats caused more storms and thunderstorms to occur, Popular Science reported. In bustling seaside areas, the number of storms with lightning is twice as high as normal.

It is much more thunderstorm due to emissions from human activities.(Photo: Farmers' Almanac).

Pumping small particles into the atmosphere can create thunderstorms with lightning. Lightning formed in the clouds contained ice, liquid water and straight moving air streams. When heavy ice particles, called soft stones, move down due to gravity, smaller snow particles will go up in the air stream, collide and discharge.

Soft stones are often negatively charged and snow particles have a positive charge. They bump into each other, causing electric discharge, forming lightning. Thunder will occur more if the ideal conditions, ie clouds containing water, ice particles and snow crystals, appear more often.

Aerosols are small liquid or solid particles such as steam, smoke, dust, which contribute to cloud formation. If the air is too clean, less aerosols, then the clouds are less likely to form.

The clouds will be large and heavy when absorbing the surrounding water. Therefore, they will fall faster to create rain rain without lightning. In other words , small matter particles in the air are factors that cause thunderstorms to carry many thunderstorms.

Scientists conducted research to find out how much of these particles, such as vehicles, boats and factories, produce gas, affect how clay is formed. In 2004, expert Robert Holzworth at the University of Washington began creating a sensor system called the Global Lightning Positioning System.

"Every time lightning appears, the radio waves in the atmosphere will be noisy," said Joel Thornton, atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle. " If you place the sensor in places where interference can be detected, when they detect interference at different times, you can analyze, contrast and locate where lightning occurs" .

Emissions from boats pump more particulate matter into the air.(Photo: Hoyer Motors).

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

"Virts points out two bands that look like a sea lane," Thornton said. They quickly discovered that thunder occurred more frequently in the lanes of boats.

When studying aerosol particles and their relationship to cloud formation and thunder, Thornton realized that the main catalyst was particles from the exhaust of ships. On land there are many particulate matter created by forest fires, dust or pollution. But the sea is not that much.

Adding more particulate matter in a small area that should be very clean makes the storms more dangerous with more thunder.

Human polluting activities not only affect the climate in the long term, but also directly affect the weather."By adding particles from ship emissions to the atmosphere, we may be turning ordinary storms into thunderstorms with thunderstorms , " Thornton said.