From the DOE/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a new paper in GRL saying something that doesn’t make much sense to me. As shown in the diagram above, thunderstorms transport heat from the lower troposphere upwards. The heat source at the base of the atmosphere (at the surface) is the absorption of sunlight by the surface of the Earth. That transfers heat to the lower atmosphere by conduction (a small amount), and mostly be re-radiated Long Wave IR. Heat is then transported upwards by convection, which is done by clouds (cumulus for example) and especially thunderstorms. So, given the amount of energy transport, I’m puzzled as to how they think this new theory works as a net warming, especially when all they are doing is running a model, and providing no hard data. They say:
Pollution strengthens thunderstorm clouds, causing their anvil-shaped tops to spread out high in the atmosphere and capture heat — especially at night
Basically what they are saying is that thunderstorm anvils are enhanced by pollution, probably due to increased condensation nuclei, and those anvils act as IR reflectors at night…but…they also act as strong sunlight reflectors, something that goes on every day in the ITCZ, as Willis has pointed out with his Thermostat Hypothesis, now a peer reviewed paper. Steve McIntyre also offered a view that clouds offer a strong net negative feedback here.
But when an abstract ends with this:
The positive aerosol radiative forcing on deep clouds could offset the negative aerosol radiative forcing on low clouds to an unknown extent.
I wonder how this speculation got published in the first place.
Pollution teams with thunderclouds to warm atmosphere
New simulation study shows that atmosphere warms when pollution intensifies storms
RICHLAND, Wash. — Pollution is warming the atmosphere through summer thunderstorm clouds, according to a computational study published May 10 in Geophysical Research Letters. How much the warming effect of these clouds offsets the cooling that other clouds provide is not yet clear. To find out, researchers need to incorporate this new-found warming into global climate models.
Pollution strengthens thunderstorm clouds, causing their anvil-shaped tops to spread out high in the atmosphere and capture heat — especially at night, said lead author and climate researcher Jiwen Fan of the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
“Global climate models don’t see this effect because thunderstorm clouds simulated in those models do not include enough detail,” said Fan. “The large amount of heat trapped by the pollution-enhanced clouds could potentially impact regional circulation and modify weather systems.”
Clouds are one of the most poorly understood components of Earth’s climate system. Called deep convective clouds, thunderstorm clouds reflect a lot of the sun’s energy back into space, trap heat that rises from the surface, and return evaporated water back to the surface as rain, making them an important part of the climate cycle.
To more realistically model clouds on a small scale, such as in this study, researchers use the physics of temperature, water, gases and aerosols — tiny particles in the air such as pollution, salt or dust on which cloud droplets form.
In large-scale models that look at regions or the entire globe, researchers substitute a stand-in called a parameterization to account for deep convective clouds. The size of the grid in global models can be a hundred times bigger than an actual thunderhead, making a substitute necessary.
However, thunderheads are complicated, dynamic clouds. Coming up with an accurate parameterization is important but has been difficult due to their dynamic nature.
Inside a thunderstorm cloud, warm air rises in updrafts, pushing tiny aerosols from pollution or other particles upwards. Higher up, water vapor cools and condenses onto the aerosols to form droplets, building the cloud. At the same time, cold air falls, creating a convective cycle. Generally, the top of the cloud spreads out like an anvil.
Previous work showed that when it’s not too windy, pollution leads to bigger clouds . This occurs because more pollution particles divide up the available water for droplets, leading to a higher number of smaller droplets that are too small to rain. Instead of raining, the small droplets ride the updrafts higher, where they freeze and absorb more water vapor. Collectively, these events lead to bigger, more vigorous convective clouds that live longer.
Now, researchers from PNNL, Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the University of Maryland took to high-performance computing to study the invigoration effect on a regional scale.
To find out which factors contribute the most to the invigoration, Fan and colleagues set up computer simulations for two different types of storm systems: warm summer thunderstorms in southeastern China and cool, windy frontal systems on the Great Plains of Oklahoma. The data used for the study was collected by different DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement facilities.
The simulations had a resolution that was high enough to allow the team to see the clouds develop. The researchers then varied conditions such as wind speed and air pollution.
Fan and colleagues found that for the warm summer thunderstorms, pollution led to stronger storms with larger anvils. Compared to the cloud anvils that developed in clean air, the larger anvils both warmed more — by trapping more heat — and cooled more — by reflecting additional sunlight back to space. On average, however, the warming effect dominated.
The springtime frontal clouds did not have a similarly significant warming effect. Also, increasing the wind speed in the summer clouds dampened the invigoration by aerosols and led to less warming.
This is the first time researchers showed that pollution increased warming by enlarging thunderstorm clouds. The warming was surprisingly strong at the top of the atmosphere during the day when the storms occurred. The pollution-enhanced anvils also trapped more heat at night, leading to warmer nights.
“Those numbers for the warming are very big,” said Fan, “but they are calculated only for the exact day when the thunderstorms occur. Over a longer time-scale such as a month or a season, the average amount of warming would be less because those clouds would not appear everyday.”
Next, the researchers will look into these effects on longer time scales. They will also try to incorporate the invigoration effect in global climate models.
The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. The data from China were gathered under a bilateral agreement with the China Ministry of Sciences and Technology.
Reference: Jiwen Fan, Daniel Rosenfeld, Yanni Ding, L. Ruby Leung, and Zhanqing Li, 2012. Potential Aerosol Indirect Effects on Atmospheric Circulation and Radiative Forcing through Deep Convection, Geophys. Res. Lett. May 10, DOI 10.1029/2012GL051851 (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2012GL051851.shtml)
==================================================================
Here’s the abstract:
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 39, L09806, 7 PP., 2012
doi:10.1029/2012GL051851
Potential aerosol indirect effects on atmospheric circulation and radiative forcing through deep convection
Key Points
- Aerosol invigoration (AIV) on deep convective clouds incurs positive radiative forcing
- AIV also leads to enhanced regional convergence, and a strong thermodynamic forcing
- Wind shear and cloud base T determine significance of aerosol invigoration effect
Jiwen Fan Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, Washington, USA
Daniel Rosenfeld Institute of Earth Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
Yanni Ding Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA
L. Ruby Leung Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, Washington, USA
Zhanqing Li Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA
Abstract:
Aerosol indirect effects, i.e., the interactions of aerosols with clouds by serving as cloud condensation nuclei or ice nuclei constitute the largest uncertainty in climate forcing and projection. Previous IPCC reported negative aerosol indirect forcing, which does not account for aerosol-convective cloud interactions because the complex processes involved are poorly understood and represented in climate models. Here we elucidated how aerosols change convective intensity, diabatic heating, and regional circulation under different environmental conditions. We found that aerosol indirect effect on deep convective cloud systems could lead to enhanced regional convergence and a strong top-of-atmosphere warming. Aerosol invigoration effect occurs mainly in warmed-based convection with weak shear. This could result in a strong radiative warming in the atmosphere (up to +5.6 W m−2), a lofted latent heating, and a reduced diurnal temperature difference, all of which could potentially impact regional circulation and modify weather systems. The positive aerosol radiative forcing on deep clouds could offset the negative aerosol radiative forcing on low clouds to an unknown extent.
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While cloudy nights may seem warmer, once it begins to rain or snow, there is a powerful ground-level cooling effect, as that water is not subject to any direct adiabatic warming as it falls and later it will extract its heat of vaporization on return to the atmosphere.
Note that the Svensmark theory is predicated on cooling caused by increased clouds in the atmosphere nurtured by cosmic radiation. I maintain that more clouds must signal an enhanced rate of convective cooling.
“That transfers heat to the lower atmosphere by conduction (a small amount), and mostly be re-radiated Long Wave IR. Heat is then transported upwards by convection, which is done by clouds (cumulus for example) and especially thunderstorms. ”
There’s one very important omission from that statement. A very significant amount heat is transfered from the surface by evaporation. This is stored as latent heat in the moist air mass that rises by convection. This is greater than the sensible heat (temperature related heat) that also rises with convection.
This heat is deposited at higher levels during precipitation.
Models do not model the cloud formation and precipitation processes because they are not understood well enough to be modeled. It is guestimated by what is called “parameterisation” . This is the big fudge factor in climate science that everyone tries to ignore.
It is precisely these “parameters” that give rise to the spurious x3 positive feedback. Roy Spencer has calculated that just 2% variation in cloud would be equivalent to the CO2 forcing we are all supposed to get hysterical over. Does anyone imagine that their crude parameters are within 2% of the true climate?
Any paper basing its conclusion of such grossly incomplete modeling is equally spurious.
Anthony, I suggest you correct that important omission in your introductory paragraph. Transport by latent heat is fundamental. This lack of understanding of cloud formation and precipitation is the key to the whole issue.
Russ, Larry, Robert, Keith…
That’s what I thought. Thirty years ago I learned that the reason Earth cannot succumb to a runaway greenhouse effect is that the latent heat of H2O is dumped high in the atmosphere to be largely radiated away. This was, in those days, reckoned to account for almost a quarter of all outgoing radiation. It has always worried me that the effect of warming on this major mechanism is never explicit in IPPC AR’s etc (inevitably, you’d think, a major negative feedback/buffer).
Larry Ledwick (hotrod) says:
May 18, 2012 at 2:27 pm
I would like to invite the authors to spend a few days storm chasing on the eastern plains of Colorado. Sitting in the car for hours sweltering in the afternoon heat watching the storm cells try to break through the convective cap, then after the thunderstorm finally develops, watching in awe as the cloud rockets up ward at over 200 mph. The stom building so fast you literally have to progressively tilt your head back to watch the top of the convective column rise. The after an inch or two of 40 deg F rain falls, standing beside the car at sun set, shivering in the chill of a cool 60 degree breeze and watch the ground fog drift across the soaked farm fields, and the spectacular sun sets as the thunder storm melts away and cruises off to the east to repeat that refrigeration cycle.
These storms lift cubic kilometers of hot moist air to high enough altitude for the moisture to not only condense to liquid water but to freeze out as ice crystals. Both the water droplets and ice crystals liberating huge amounts of latent heat as the phase change occurs. This air now warmed by the liberated heat rises to 60,000+ ft elevations where it can radiate enormous amounts of heat energy directly to space. Some of the up drafts are so vigorous that they form “over shooting tops” as the updraft punches up through the tropopause and pushes into the stratosphere only to sink back down below the tropopause after it radiates away its heat energy into the -30 to -50 deg F air above it.
=============
And others who’ve described the WATER CYCLE – this, as I’ve been trying to point out, IS MISSING from the AGWScienceFiction comic cartoon energy budget…
The WATER CYCLE cools the earth from the 67°C it would be without water but with the real gas atmosphere of mostly nitrogen and oxygen. The AGWSF “greenhouse gas warming from minus 18°C to 15°C – doesn’t exist – it is a sleight of hand. It misses out the Water Cycle.
They don’t have it. Because they don’t have convection. They don’t know how it works. Because, they have a different atmosphere. Actually, really, they have empty space where we, in the real world, have a heavy ocean of fluid gas. This real gas has volume, weight, attraction. All this is missing from the AGW energy budget.
They have radiation in empty space with ideal gas molecules not real molecules. Doesn’t anyone here apart from me know the difference? So their descriptions of ideal gas molecules as in an empty space container – diffusing spontaneously and mixing thoroughly because they are non-existent hard dots bouncing off each other, not real molecules. Real and Ideal are technical terms. No real gas obeys the ideal gas law. The ideal gas is a fiction useful in calculations like average, it doesn’t actually exist. They use actual ideal gas descriptions and apply this to real gases. Ideal gases don’t have volume, so their atmosphere has empty space instead of the volume of fluid real gas above us.
Ideal gas doesn’t have weight, so is not subject to gravity, so their ideal gas molecules can’t separate out without work being done – the complete opposite of real molecules in the real world – real gas molecules separate out. Carbon dioxide is heavier than nitrogen and oxygen and without work being done will naturally sink displacing these to come to ground, lumpy – they instead have ideal gas carbon dioxide molecules which spontaneously diffuse into their atmosphere and bounce off their other ideal gas molecules of oxgen and nitrogen and so get thoroughly mixed and, so, their claim that carbon dioxide accumulates for hundreds and thousands of years – it has no way of out of their imaginary empty space in a container where only radiation rules . They can’t explain evaporation in their empty space ideal gas molecule atmosphere.., so they say their gases aren’t buoyant in air. That’s why they don’t have convection – they have an empty space atmosphere of imaginary ideal gas dots zooming around at great speeds in a container.
Their gases don’t have volume, their atmosphere is actual empty space – they have no sound, they can’t hear this… Put in lots of exclamation marks.
Their ideal gas molecules don’t have attraction, so they can’t have carbon dioxide and water vapour attracting, they have no rain; in the real world of real gases with real attraction we have rain which is water and carbon dioxide, carbonic acid, as in fog, dew – because real gases have attraction. Real gas carbon dioxide can’t accumulate in the atmosphere, it either comes down displacing air because heavier, subject to gravity, or comes down in the water cycle – it’s a cycle.
Surely there has to be someone on this top science blog who can understand what I’m saying?
For pity’s sake. Look at their AGW comic cartoon. It isn’t a picture of the real world. Their fisics is fake. FAKE.
All of it.
FAKE.
Seriously considering banging head against brick wall.
Not mine.
Joke.
And, they’ve excluded the real heat direct from the Sun – they’ve taken out the direct thermal infrared from the Sun which actuall we feel as heat because this is what warms us up…
They’ve given the property of thermal infrared to their comic cartoon shortwave, Light, not Heat, from the Sun heats up their imaginary fictional Earth.
What does it take to get reality back into these arguments?
Complete rubbish. Cb clouds cool the surface given the large mass of water vapour evapourated from the surface with the latent heat required for this simple operation. This latent heat is released at height where it can escape to space
otter17~ If common sense is all it takes to discredit a peer-reviewed paper, then it wasn’t a very well done paper to begin with, was it?
Uh, No!
Outside of more emails getting leaked that demonstrate how the peer review process has been hijacked and controlled through pal review, absurd notions that are published as peer reviewed papers are the clearest evidence that the whole scam of published peer reviewed papers obstruct science, not advance it.
Every one of these pal reviewed and buddy back slap papers advances the idea that publishing papers into science oriented blogs is now the truest method for rigorous science. Of course, this only works for those blogs that DO NOT borehole honest critiques, like WUWT.
It also will be eventually worthwhile to track IP sources in order to identify the professional and amateur trolls. Not necessarily to muzzle them, but to identify them so when troll try to bait or baffle folks will know not to pay attention to them (Don’t feed the trolls!).
When common sense is unable to winnow out the real ideas or research in a paper, that is strong evidence that the paper should not have been published. Typos are understood in that all ten fingers (or just two-four fingers plus a thumb in the case of most white collar and self educated typists), often hit the wrong key. I have always been a computer rather than a professional typist. I may be able to type thirty-forty words a minute, but I’ve used backspace often in those forty words.
Weasel words in a published paper (would could might maybe and many more caveat empowering words) indicate areas where research is inconclusive. When research is indecisive, it means scientific method was not rigorously applied nor that project properly managed. In clim-sci, in comes across as a wail for more money, more conferences and trips and more demands on honest worker types for support.
By these methods, papers in any of published journals need no official paper published to rebut or otherwise correct them. The papers themselves have already discredited themselves. As went Scientific American, National Geographic so goes so many formerly trusted and revered publications. I used to keep every copy, now I won’t subscribe and when some fool thinks we need a “gift subscription’ I donate the mags to local kindergartens and playgroups for the kids to cut the pictures out.
One does wonder just what an editor in such publications thinks their job is supposed to be. Indecisive, unclear, twisted or nonsensical writings should never be acceptable, let alone ensuring the science illustrated (elucidated) is correctly followed and results properly interpreted. When an editor had reservations about articles but was forced to publish, they often included their concerns/cautions in a foreword.
All assumptions in a paper should be clearly stated. All code and formulas included. Publishing code and formulas is traditionally how initial ownership is identified; patenting worthwhile ideas or methods is the only other alternative. Keeping code or data or anything ‘secret’ is indication of false pretenses. Maybe Fermat really did have proof for his theorem, but no-one really believes Fermat was that good in math. Only Fermat believed it. Sure sounds like some of the more infamous climate scientistas… And their published peer/pal reviewed papers and secret data.
When the trolls harangue commenters to peer review and publish their papers rebuttal or new, all involved here recognize that as troll speak in the climate crowd control process to obstruct rather than defend science. Let those researchers who are unable to write about real science in clear succinct fashion wither away as the borehole blogs that support them are withering. Their funding will wither away soon too.
hotrod: That was a great description of thunderstorms. I could see, hear and feel them.
These folks didn’t say what kind of “pollution.” Just aerosols. Do they mean sulfates or will any old, common, garden variety pollution do the trick? The whole thing seemed a tad vague, but if you have no specifics, no one can call you on them.
Kasuha says:
May 18, 2012 at 3:50 pm
It is a known fact that cloudy nights are usually warmer than clear nights. Clouds are not transparent to infrared so they trap it and re-radiate back. And they also radiate their own heat.
On the other hand, during day I’d say they’d have quite strong cooling effect by reflecting visible sunlight back into space without giving it a chance to convert to infrared.
Another important (but not so well known) effect is that clouds in general warm up the atmosphere. Water vapor condensating to water droplets releases all of the heat which was stored to it during vaporisation. This generates strong convection which is keeping the cloud up in the sky, but it also heats up the air. And the more clouds, the more of such heating. But that’s not actual warming because it’s releasing heat which was trapped elsewhere (to create the vapor). So it counts as increased heat transport but not as any additional heat.
Kashua – you have not read the paper or you are displaying your bias. The paper is about severe convective weather colloquially called thunder storms. Claiming that the top of the storms – their anvils heads – are prolonged by aerosols. As any observation will tell you a convective storm cools the surface sometimes by a considerable amount. Warm humid air rises and as it does the water vapor condenses giving up latent heat of condensation warming the air more which rises faster and as the lapse rate cools further the droplets freeze giving up latent heat of fusion warming the air again which rises faster thus transporting heat to the top of the troposphere. The vertical updrafts can be well in excess of 100 mph and in the tropics can reach heights of over 10 miles. The frozen water droplets eventually become too heavy and fall to the surface if they stay frozen they are called hail if they melt taking the latent heat from the atmosphere the large drops are heavy rain. This is why it is always cooler after a storm has passed.
You are either deliberately or out of lack of knowledge confusing low stratus cloud with convective storms. I suggest you read some of the many primers on convective weather and thunderstorms available on the internet. You will find more heat is transported to the tropopause to be radiated to space by convection than by any other means.
Instead of raining, the small droplets ride the updrafts higher, where they freeze and absorb more water vapor. Collectively, these events lead to bigger, more vigorous convective clouds that live longer.
No, they lead to freezing rain, sleet, or hail, depending on the vigor of the updrafts, the freezing level, and the air temperature below the clouds.
Simulation is simulation. Reality is reality. Never the twain shall meet.
Erwinia Caratovora.These little creatures are in every cloud. They act as condensation nuclei. What makes them bloom? Are they part of this “pollution” mentioned as condensation nuclei? A major aspect of cloud formation is not included in their simulation.
Simulation is simulation. Reality is reality. Never the twain shall meet.
Anvils do persist for a long time, sometimes, but they’re thin, and I believe, mostly glaciated. The phase changing over their disspation period would absorb a certain amount of energy, rather then let it go off. There is some albedo effect, but I’m willing to bet that rather than albedo reflection, the insolar energy is largely what contributes to the phase change and dissipation. The contribution to ground temp would be cooling by retaining insolar heat at altitude, rather than warming. The heat exchange due to IR blankineting would be insignificant relative to the heat transfer than occurred during the active phase of the thunderstorm. The latter is energy neutral to the planet – just a redistrbution.
Assuming (I know) that nucleation is necessary for rain and water droplet formation in cloud systems of all types, by the anvil phase, those aerosols are already sequestered. They may contribute to the speed and density of the convective event, but once anvilized, they’re done as a contributor to the heat event, other than any contribution they make in the density and dissipation rate of the anvil.
Every time I’ve seen material on this subject, low clouds warm and high clouds cool. Thunder storms do have high clouds and views from space show a high albedo. If Sunlight can’t get to the surface, it can’t be converted to IR. Thus, if Sunlight is reflected, it HAS to COOL the Earth. This doesn’t even take into account heat transport via convection. This article has to be a crock of you-know-what.
‘They will also try to incorporate the invigoration effect in global climate models.”
Gotta love it.
The new, and contentious, aspect of this paper is the claim that anthropogenic pollutants may be providing more cloud condensation nuclei and therefore enabling the formation of bigger and longer lasting thunderclouds.
The basic thermodynamics of a thunderstorm are established. They warm a vast volume of air by convective transport of water vapor causing cloud formation. You cannot condense that much water vapor without the thermal energy going somewhere. And while the clouds reflect sunlight, they are going to prevent very low nighttime temperatures reducing the diurnal variation.
As a retired operational meteorologist (forecaster), I’d say that Larry Ledwick hit the nail on the head. Thunderstorms are the greatest cooling mechanism known.
Summary
Pollution causes lesscoolingmorecooling thunderstorms, lessmore rain, smallerbigger hail, and lessmore snow. But it always causes more money to be had. Always. This is actually one of the democratic party planks doncha know.
izen says:
May 19, 2012 at 8:42 am
The new, and contentious, aspect of this paper is the claim that anthropogenic pollutants may be providing more cloud condensation nuclei and therefore enabling the formation of bigger and longer lasting thundercloud
========================
You mean like the drought and dust storms of the 1930’s and 40’s…………
“Pollution is warming the atmosphere through summer thunderstorm clouds, according to a computational study published May 10 in Geophysical Research Letters. How much the warming effect of these clouds offsets the cooling that other clouds provide is not yet clear. To find out, researchers need to incorporate this new-found warming into global climate models.”
Folks, when I see “according to a computational study” and “new-found warming into global climate models” my BS meter is pegged and I know what I’m reading is garbage. Especially when there are no real world observations and data to verify their “simulations”.
Jay Davis
Larry Ledwick (hotrod) had a post on thunderstorms from the point of view of a storm chaser in Colorado. I think his post is quite an understatement.
Steve Keohane is of the impression that anvil heads were caused by horizontal shear at altitude. That is what I have always been taught.
LC Kirk, Perth speaks of the incredible power and violence of thunderstorms. He also says “Besides which, you really can’t beat a good thunderstorm for pure entertainment!”.
I have been watching thunderstorms for over 50 years. They can be very good entertainment – I actually missed then while I was in college in the Los Angeles area.
I have great doubts that they can be modeled with any reasonable degree of accuracy. Among the reasons for this are:
A: There is great detail inside a storm, a storm a mile or two across can have internal features as small as a hundred feet. When a storm collapses, a phenomena called a microburst can send a downdraft with a diameter as small as 100 yards at a speed in excess of 200 miles per hour. I live in Tulsa Oklahoma and there have been two destructive microbursts within 3 miles of my home. They were first mistaken for tornadoes, but all the damage was from straight winds coming radially from a central point.
B: The internal complexity can be illustrated by examination of a large hailstone. Break one in half and you can see a series of layers of ice. A 3 inch diameter hailstone may have over 50 layers. This makes me suspect that it had dropped down and then had been blown back up to accumulate another layer at least 50 times. I have not tried to calculate the wind velocity needed to take a 3 inch hailstone back up into the freezing zone and keep it there long enough to accumulate another layer, but the fact that it made many round trips indicates a very complex structure in the thunderstorm. The velocities that hailstones can reach is very high. Pilots are strongly advised to avoid thunderstorms. They are warned that there have been cases of hailstone strikes when the plane had several miles of clear air between it and the thunderstorm.
C: There are several types of storms. Not all storms have a strong wind shear within reach to knock the top into an anvil shape. I suspect that those winds take a lot of energy out of the storm since I believe that storms with anvil heads dissipate more quickly than those without them. I am convinced that wind shear is responsible for the anvil top since I have seen only ones with a sharp, well defined anvil pointing in one direction.
D: There are several causes for thunderstorms. Some come with weather fronts, but others form as isolated events. The latter seem to form in the early afternoon, build quickly, and dissipate fairly rapidly. They are also the ones which are most apt to have anvil tops. I suspect that the turbulence which comes with a weather front may inhibit the formation of anvil tops. The ones that form as isolated events have a good chance of repeating from day to day until the moisture they drop gets absorbed or spread around, or the temperature drops enough that the heat engine cannot get restarted.
E: It is almost impossible to get instruments into a storm. I attended a seminar where a presentation was given by a pilot who had flown a specially armored, modified, and instrumented fighter jet into a thunderstorm. He wound up ejecting and claimed that he was caught in the storm for about 40 minutes after he ejected. I doubt that he ever did it again. I doubt that there are radars with the required resolution which can penetrate into the storm. Without being able to get data on the internals of a storm, I have no idea how you could refine or verify the model.
Donald K. Mitchell
Donald Mitchell,
You may be interested in this.
Myrrh says @ur momisugly May 19, 2012 at 2:49 am
….And others who’ve described the WATER CYCLE – this, as I’ve been trying to point out, IS MISSING from the AGWScienceFiction comic cartoon energy budget…….
============
Yes Water is very much conspicuously absent. It is one of the things I first noticed.
============
Myrrh says
What does it take to get reality back into these arguments?
============
“Science advances one funeral at a time.” ~ Max Planck
In this case we need a whole heck of a lot of funerals. Unfortunately the young have been indoctrinated in the new religion from the day they set foot in school. This is not by accident but to make sure the next couple of generations stay brain washed so they do not mind being starved to death. Communitarianism aka sustainability, sacrifices the individual for the “common good”
So, there is no verification by way of observation, but if there is a surprisingly strong warming at the top of the atmosphere; and, in addition, there is the reflection of sunlight; and finally, since thunderstorms also dry the air, could they not also aid in opening a thermal IR window from the ground? Cooling mechanisms everywhere … it’s really time to design a real experiment…
Smokey, Donald Mitchell:
This young German paraglider spent quite a long time hig up inside a massive thunderstorm out here in Australia:
http://www.weatherimagery.com/blog/paraglider-caught-in-thunderstorm/
There was a one-hour award winning ABC (Australian ABC) TV documentary made about her experience, which included quite a lot of her observational detail, and some interpretation and conclusions as to how she actually managed to survive the experience:
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/geo/documentaries/interactive/miracles/
Unfortunately the only part available on Youtube seems to be a 4 minute string of the more dramatised excerpts. The full length ABC doco has expired for download, but can be obtained from them. The detail of interest is in the commentary on the full length version.