Lightning and Heavy Rain.

Hi All,

Although this is not electronics, I wish to hear your opinions in explaining the following natural phenomena:

"After a serious lightning (obviously a loud thunder too), a rather heavy rain follows for a while."

Thank you.

Kerim

Better to ask Nikola Tesla for this. :-D


You have something specific in mind or general ?

You have something specific in mind or general ?

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You got it because I have something in mind. But I preferred to hear first some opinions that can relate the two events scientifically.

Kerim

Better to ask Nikola Tesla for this. :-D


You have something specific in mind or general ? Or just talking about how to recharge batteries on lightning? :lol:

In my opinion, it could be explained far from our dear Tesla

I meant, what could be the best explanation to show why more water should fall down after a lightning. Got it?

Kerim

I will send You some material about this.

This is big mistery for us civilian today, but for military of specific country .

I must find first that documents in my 8TB archive.

Really?!... Do you think it is a military secret? :grin::grin:
When do military guys have secrets about the rain? :shock:

Kerim

KerimF said:

Really?!... Do you think it is a military secret?
When do military guys have secrets about the rain?

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Of course it is!!! Creation and tampering with this "things" is area of military specially for few countries.

Do You think that future wars will be with guns? :lol:


I recently watch one docu movie after WW2 they try to make storms and big rain in austria (military) all village is :-( flooded :-(

I got your idea ... mainly about the earthquakes so-called natural which could happen suddenly and surprise not the human beings only but also all animals and the earthquake monitors as well.

But returning to the subject here, I am afraid that these two successive events; lightning followed by a relatively heavy rain for a while, are dated since millions of years, I guess, even before we, human beings, were evolved... right? ;-)

Kerim

Ok for that, but todays is different thing there is also factor of humans.


I searching some pictures to show You, I hope so for finding this.

Hmmm... I am afraid that I asked a real tough scientific question :wink:

Kerim

It can be considered common knowledge, that the water drop (and hail) fall is the basic mechanism that causes the charge differences and finally lightning discharge in a thunderstorm. (A detail explanation is possibly somewhat more difficult and involves initial electrical fields in the atmosphere, et al).

So the main point needing explanation would be, why (in some cases) the lightning comes first? I can offer two considerations
- the lightning comes possibly from a approaching thunderstorm, it's center (with most heavy rain) reaches you some time later
- the thunderstorm is actually above you, but the rain drops need a considerable time from it's center (e.g. 5 or 10 km high) down to earth.

I don't think, that there's an opposite mechanism of a lightning stroke triggering rainfall.

you are sitting in a car and waiting for the traffic light. Suddenly you heard tires squeaking behind you and you got rear ended.
Tire noise = thunder
car crashed into yours = cloud
shock = rain

For many years, even before radar, pilots used the association of lightning with turbulence to avoid storms. They detected lightning with their ADF or NDB receivers (aerial direction finding or non-directional beacon). ADF receivers are generally in the AM bradcast radio band. They tend to point to lightning strikes.

In the 1970's, Ryan developed a commercial version called Stormscope and sold it as an alternative to radar. (I tried to find a good history, but couldn't.) Here is a link to an early evaluation:

Evaluation of the Ryan Stormscope as a severe weather avoidance system for aircr

The Stormscope was particularly attractive to pilots of single-engine aircraft, because it did not require a radar dome to be mounted out on the wing. More recently, radar and Stormscope have been integrated. There are proponents who say that turbulence is better predicted by the Stormscope than by radar. Of course, the pilot wants to avoid turbulence. Heavy rain, which is detected by radar, is not such a problem per se. The Stormscope was bought by 3M and then Raytheon. Here is a current site for Stormscope:

**broken link removed**

The older Stormscopes are available on eBay for quite reasonable prices, considering they were >$1,000 in the 1970's.

stormscope | eBay

John

I've seen the same thing many times. Increased intensity of rain following a loud thunderclap during a storm.

Along the same lines, when armies engaged in a long battle involving a lot of cannonfire, it was common for it to rain afterward (if the day was already cloudy).

Hearing that, it leads me to believe that the thunderclap literally shakes the cloud and causes an increase in rain for a while.

By the time we hear the thunder, the rainsurge has had time to reach the ground.

However as I think about it...

Sometimes the increased rain comes too soon after the thunderclap. As though it started falling before the lightning.

So there ought to be another explanation which is equally scientific.

Water builds up a static charge simply falling through the air. The like charge repels itself. A strongly charged waterdrop bursts apart.

You can observe this if you toss a pot of water into the air. You can watch the large globules explode after falling just a few feet.

There is a fascinating experiment called 'Sparking buckets', which creates static discharges by dropping two streams of water drops through wire rings connected to opposite buckets. As the charge builds up, the falling waterdrops can be seen to burst into fragments as they get close to the rings.

It's similar to static charge building up in rainclouds. Eventually a lightning discharge occurs.

So by the same token, it's plausible that the water in rainclouds repels itself in reaction to the growing static charge. This is before the lightning bolt.

So the rain surge falls for several seconds, THEN the lightning bolt and thunder.

This would account for the rain surge reaching us so quickly after the thunder.

FvM said:

the water drop (and hail) fall is the basic mechanism that causes the charge differences and finally lightning discharge in a thunderstorm.

Click to expand...

So to you, while it rains normally, the cloud water suddenly decides to drop heavily, a mechanism that causes the lightning. Then the rain restores its normal fall after a short time.

This will araise another question about which mechanism lets the cloud water to condense quickly in the first place and just for a relatively short time.

To me, I see it in reverse, The lighting occurs first which actually is a sort of fire (and electricity) and because of it more water from the cloud is added temporarily to the falling rain and its quantiy is proportional to the strength of lightning.

But perhaps you may find an explanation about how, while it is raining normally, a quantity of water (in the clouds) is able to be condensed much faster for a short time then this will always stimulate the occurence of a lightning.

Our difference is therefore which one occurs first; the lightning or the heavy rain in the clouds.

Kerim

Sorry, I will give my explanation after hearing more opinions :-D

After I read the post by BradtheRad, I may say that "Water builds up a static charge simply falling through the air" will likely be a good stimulus for generating a lightning (most of the time cascaded to many areas) which in turn will let the heavy rain to occur from the striked areas in the clouds.

A thunderstorm isn't just heavy rain, it's a complex meteorological phenomenon. You should at least find the time to review a brief description e.g. at Wikipedia. If you had the oportunity to view a thunderstorm from an airplane, that could narrowly escape it by climbing to 12 km, you won't compare it to common rain fall.

You are right FvM... but I was referring to normal raining days with one or a few lightning's that may occur over the city I live in

I'm not familiar with the weather in Syria, but we have "thundery showers" in Western Europe too. In my understanding, they are small "single-cell" thunderstorms with only a few lightnings (may be just one).

I got your point, FvM.

This is why perhaps I notice here the phenomena I described more clearly since we seldom have a thunderstorm. Today it was raining, so after seeing a lightning over my neighborhood and as expected, a heavy rain followed a few tens of seconds later and also for a few tens of seconds only. Then the rain returned to normal.

I guess, in thunderstorms many things could happen simultaneously so it may be rather difficult to observe the events separately.

Kerim