Pan Zengxin, Mao Feiyue, Rosenfeld Daniel, Zhu Yannian, Zang Lin, Lu Xin, Thornton Joel A, Holzworth Robert H, Yin Jianhua, Efraim Avichay, Gong Wei
State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping, and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, 430079, Wuhan, China.
Institute of Earth Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 91904, Israel.
Nat Commun. 2022 Aug 2;13(1):4289. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-31714-5.
The known effects of thermodynamics and aerosols can well explain the thunderstorm activity over land, but fail over oceans. Here, tracking the full lifecycle of tropical deep convective cloud clusters shows that adding fine aerosols significantly increases the lightning density for a given rainfall amount over both ocean and land. In contrast, adding coarse sea salt (dry radius > 1 μm), known as sea spray, weakens the cloud vigor and lightning by producing fewer but larger cloud drops, which accelerate warm rain at the expense of mixed-phase precipitation. Adding coarse sea spray can reduce the lightning by 90% regardless of fine aerosol loading. These findings reconcile long outstanding questions about the differences between continental and marine thunderstorms, and help to understand lightning and underlying aerosol-cloud-precipitation interaction mechanisms and their climatic effects.
热力学和气溶胶的已知效应能够很好地解释陆地的雷暴活动，但在海洋上却不适用。在此，对热带深对流云团的完整生命周期进行追踪表明，添加细颗粒物气溶胶会显著增加海洋和陆地上给定降雨量下的闪电密度。相比之下，添加粗海盐（干半径>1μm），即所谓的海沫，会通过产生更少但更大的云滴来削弱云的活力和闪电，这些云滴会加速暖雨过程，却以混合相降水为代价。无论细颗粒物气溶胶的负荷如何，添加粗海盐都能使闪电减少90%。这些发现解决了长期以来关于大陆雷暴和海洋雷暴差异的悬而未决的问题，并有助于理解闪电以及潜在的气溶胶-云-降水相互作用机制及其气候效应。
