Book Description

The basic concept of lightning suppression by chaff seeding is to increase the conductivity inside a thunderstorm by a continuous release of ions liberated through corona discharge on chaff fibers which are dispersed from an airplane inside the cloud. This increased conductivity would permit the current produced by the thunderstorm to flow from the positive to the negative charge center or from the negative charge center to the ground without the generation of the high electric fields which are necessary to initiate lightning discharges. The application of this simple concept to modify the electric field or the lightning activity of a real thunderstorm encounters a number of questions on the theoretical as well as on the practical side that are difficult to answer. For instance, (1) Will the corona discharge be quenched by its own space-charge production if a certain amount of the released charge is trapped by cloud particles in the close environment of the chaff fibers? ; (2) Does the generation of a conducting chaff-seeded area in the storm produce a filed concentrating effect at the boundary of the area that is apt to generate rather than suppress lightning discharges? ; and (3) Can the chaff be distributed fast enough through a large enough cloud volume to discharge effectively the cloud in a reasonable time? These and other problems are discussed in detail in this report. Finally, the first results on an accelerated field decay caused by chaff seeding underneath a thunderstorm are presented.