Remote sensing of cloud base charge
Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
2017-05-17 v1
Abstract
Layer clouds are abundant in the Earth's atmosphere. Such clouds do not become sufficiently strongly charged to generate lightning, but they show weak charging along the upper and lower cloud boundaries where there is a conductivity transition. Cloud edge charging has recently been observed using balloon-carried electrometers. Measurement of cloud boundary charging without balloons is shown to be possible here for low altitude (<1km) charged cloud bases, through combining their effect on the surface electric field with laser time of flight cloud base height measurements, and the application of simple electrostatic models.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1705.05689,
title = {Remote sensing of cloud base charge},
author = {R Giles Harrison and Keri Nicoll and Karen Aplin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.05689},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
Proceedings of the Electrostatics Society of America conference, Ottawa, June 2017