“The boom of thunder and crackle of lightning generally mean one thing: a storm is coming. Curiously, though, the biggest storms of all, hurricanes, are notoriously lacking in lightning. Hurricanes blow, they rain, they flood, but seldom do they crackle,” at least that was how NASA s Patrick Barry and Tony Phillips began an article entitled ‘Electric Hurricanes’ early in 2006. The article then makes reference to three of the most powerful hurricanes of 2005 –Rita, Katrina, and Emily– with comment that they did have lightning, in fact “lots of it”.
A mystery surrounding hurricanes is their actual formation, for while it is generally accepted that a warmer than usual ocean is a pre-requisite, the formation of tropical cyclones is the topic of extensive ongoing research and is still not fully understood.
One of the reasons why cyclone formation remains mysterious could be because we are excluding one of the largest forces in nature from our intellectual armoury – electricity. The general perception is that atmospheric turbulence creates the charge separation that produces lightning and so electrical forces are excluded from any models of weather.
Much the same reasoning is applied to space where charge separation is also not deemed possible. But this attitude should have changed 100 years ago when Kristian Birkeland pointed out that the polar auroras were produced by electrical currents from the Sun, and proceeded to demonstrate that with his famous “Terrella” experiments.
As Hannes Alfven observed in 1948 “Nearly everything we know about the celestial universe has come from applying principles we have learnt in terrestrial physics…Yet there is one great branch of physics that up to now has told us little or nothing about astronomy. That branch is electricity. It is rather astonishing that this phenomenon, which has been so exhaustively studied on earth, has been of so little help in the celestial sphere”.
Alven’s student Anthony Peratt continued research into plasma universe theory and developed Particle in Cell simulation using the Maxwell-Lorentz equations to model plasma behaviour. One type of simulation involved a pair of Birkeland currents in parallel and looking top row left to right, then next row left to right, was able to produce a spiral galaxy formation, (see Figure 1). The accuracy of PIC simulation is shown in its astonishing ability to mimic known galaxy shapes (Figure 2) without using gravity.
Put simply, the two parallel Birkeland currents approach and start twisting around each other, imparting a spinning motion. This is the basic design of the Maxwell homopolar motor. Here it is the electric current that is generating the circular motion and suggests that we should be looking for signs of electrical activity in cyclones.
Louis Hissink
Perth
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.