Coarse sea spray inhibits lightning

Zengxin Pan, Feiyue Mao, Daniel Rosenfeld (), Yannian Zhu (), Lin Zang, Xin Lu, Joel A. Thornton, Robert H. Holzworth, Jianhua Yin, Avichay Efraim and Wei Gong ()
Additional contact information
Zengxin Pan: Wuhan University
Feiyue Mao: Wuhan University
Daniel Rosenfeld: Wuhan University
Yannian Zhu: Nanjing University
Lin Zang: Wuhan University
Xin Lu: Wuhan University
Joel A. Thornton: University of Washington
Robert H. Holzworth: University of Washington
Jianhua Yin: Wuhan University
Avichay Efraim: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Wei Gong: Wuhan University

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract 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.

Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-31714-5

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