On 1/13/11 12:09 PM, Dave Leddon wrote:
Duke's Cummer added that nobody knows why some thunderstorms produce gamma rays while most do not. "We really don't understand a lot of the details about how lighting works," he said. But discovering the creation of positrons "gives us a very, very important clue as to what's happening."
Thunderstorms are very interesting, and really hard to study. Some generate tornadoes, others don't. Some generate lightning, others don't.
Some problems:violent air movement makes it hard to probe physically (I love the plots of the Efield probes which always seem to end in "probe destroyed" or "probable lightning strike")
Dense rain makes it hard to probe with high resolution Doppler, and even if you do get good Doppler, that doesn't tell you much about charging behavior. And even then knowing what's happening doesn't tell you a lot about why it happens.
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