charles-chandler.org

This topic is for discussion on the paper entitled, "Supercell Thunderstorms and Tornadoes" on charles-chandler.org.

This is a complete "idea" about the nature of tornadic storms. It's really just an idea, because it does not get into the nitty-gritty of demonstrating the proofs for the contentions being made. But it's a complete idea in the sense that a wide range of data was taken into account, and the forces in consideration, if powerful enough, would generate precisely the sorts of properties possessed by tornadic storms.

Other bulletin board discussions of this topic include:

2008-10-23 ~ 2008-11-21:
http://thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1137

2008-11-02 ~ 2008-11-27:
http://www.bautforum.com/against-mainstream/80786-plasma-physics-tornadoes.html

2009-07-15 ~ 2009-11-08:
http://thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2083

2009-12-05 ~2009-12-10:
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=161312

Please note that the theory has matured since the discussions on those boards first began, mainly of course because of the discussion on those boards. So many of the comments are no longer relevant. And not all of the discussions were well-focused. But this nevertheless provides a glimpse at what other people are saying about this work (usually not so complimentary, but whatever!).

I read the whole paper. Very interesting. You've obviously put a great deal of work into this, and my compliments to you on that.

But if I could play the devil's advocate for a minute, I find it just a little bit difficult to believe that scientists haven't already gone over every single one of these possibilities. Like the bit about using magnetometers to detect tornadoes. Are we really to believe that this was "discovered" in the 1960s, but you're the first person to realize that this could be useful in tornado prediction?

Well, I'm not exactly the first person to think of the significance of using magnetometers to predict tornadoes. But yes, this WAS discovered in the 1960s, and yes, nobody ever followed up on it. To understand why, you have to remember that a lot has changed since then.

In the 1960s, so little was understood about tornadoes that it was not uncommon for researchers to go entire seasons in the field without seeing any. We have learned a lot about tornadoes since then, and now, an experienced storm chaser with a little bit of luck might see a tornado once a week. But back then, it wasn't like that. All of what we have learned about the conditions conducive to tornadogenesis in the last 40 years didn't exist then.

So consider the prospect back then, of going out into the field to prove that magnetic fields would be useful in predicting tornadoes. If you're lucky, you might see one or a couple tornadoes in a season. Otherwise, you might see a couple tornadoes in a couple of seasons. So how many would you have to see in order to develop a causal relationship between magnetic fields and tornadogenesis? Many! So how much research money would it take to keep a team of scientists in the field that many years, to get that many trials, to prove that it was worth something? Millions of dollars!

So consider the prospect of asking for millions of dollars so you can chase storms for several or many years, so you can determine if there's a causal relationship. Now consider that prospect, assuming that you don't have a theory that can explain why you think that the original discovery wasn't just a fluke. You would have been laughed out of the room. So there may have been a hallway conversion or two about this, but no follow-up proposal was ever approved.

But look at the prospect NOW. High-precision magnetometers only cost a couple hundred dollars now. And with what we know about tornadoes, and with so many people out in the field chasing these storms, if we can just get within 50 miles of the storm, we can get the magnetic field data, and chances are, there will be a storm chaser there to confirm the presence (or absence) of a tornado. So we're not talking about millions of dollars now. We're talking about something amateurs could do, for the fun of it! And we could get enough data in one season to establish the causal relationship (if it exists). So it's a whole new ballgame at this point.

Firstly I would like to commend you on this work. I think that considering that most other geophysical studies include EM theory as a basis for its findings, it's preposterous to think that meteorology completely excludes EM theory as a formidable contribution to the mechanics at work in storms outside of electrostatic phenomena.

I do however have some things to pick at though, that may only require elaboration on your part. In Chapter 9. Effect of EM on Supercells:



There appears to be no justification as to how the magnetic field was able to stabilize the motion. Is this due to magnetic force? If so, I fail to see how. At best this requires further explanation in order to consider this as such. My best guess to how this could fit into this theory would be that the charged air moving in a pseudo-toroidal motion acted as a toroid solenoid creating a unified magnetic field loop inside the toroid. This technically can follow Faraday's induction laws to prevent sudden fluctuations in the virtual electric current that is the mid cloud circulation.

I had an other funny feeling when I got to Chapter 21. Inflow Channels:


It is here that I caught a glimpse of your understanding of magnetic fields. There are many logical holes in this paragraph and it appears to be reflected on the figure.



1. Yes moving charges do create magnetic fields in the form of circular loops around a charge stream according to Biot Savart Law. The direction of the magnetic field is clockwise in the direction of the current flow. Since current is defined as the flow of electrons or negative charges, and the charge stream described in your paper is positively charged and is by standard a "positron" flow, the equivalent current is traveling out from the vortex. Not in. This would generate a magnetic field that is traveling counter clockwise in the direction of air flow.

2. You mentioned in the paragraph that a magnetic force acting on particles in the water. What particles? Water has a relatively low permeability and therefore little effect in a magnetic field. Unless you are considering the water as a charged particle and not so much of a "magnetically responsive particle".

3. You theorize that since water has more mass than air, the acceleration will act on the air instead. Due to what? Magnetic force is not an attractive force between the air and water molecules. Magnetic force effects a moving charged particle in a magnetic field. Magnetic attraction is a different concept and absolutely negligible here. Yes every force has an equal and opposite reaction but you would have to get into quantum mechanics to explain that. In the domain of influence for your work, there is no opposite reaction to magnetic force. For all intensive purposes, it just happens.

4. It seems that you are of the understanding that magnetic force occurs in a clockwise direction around a flow of charges. This is just not so. Though the terminology of magnetic force lines are synonymous with magnetic field lines indeed. The harsh reality is that the geometry of the magnetic field is only one third of the variables needed to describe the magnetic force. It appears that you are treating the magnetic field lines just as electric field lines with regards to force. In electric force the force is parallel or anti-parallel to the lines. In magnetic force, the force is orthogonal to the plane made by both the electric field and charge velocity unit vectors. Either way the force is always perpendicular to the magnetic field (of which is also perpendicular to the flow of charges). Assume your theory assumes the inflow is along the X axis, the magnetic force on a particle directly underneath the inflow could only be in any direction locked on a plane comprising the z (vertical) axis and the azimuth of the moving water born particle. Since it is doubtful all water particles are moving the same direction, the magnetic force cannot not be in a unified direction. Consequently the motion of the particles could never all be accelerating to the left or anywhere

Although I think there is a lot wrong with your magnetic theories there is strong evidence that you are onto something with this.

I also see evidence of very broad and somewhat careless assumptions in Chapter 26. Cloud Striations:



Lorentz Gyrations are plausible. But, you must somehow theorize how the storm is able to create a uniform magnetic field orthogonal to a plane parallel to the surface of the earth at the height of such striations. At the very least it must be uniform along that specific radius from the updraft centroid.

If you expect for this to be a complete theory it must have more then a weak generalization concerning magnetism. It does not need to be super specific but it needs to have inductive reasoning that confirms more can be discovered upon closer inspection. If the contentions you make are based on misconceptions on basic EM theory, people will close the book on you. It would be a shame because the rest of your paper seems to introduce concepts that make sense and could very well be confirmed. Take some time to explore this. Your work has real value and I look forward to seeing further discussion.

This is the most detailed critical review so far -- my sincerest thanks to you. Every legitimate criticism saves me years of work.


Actually, I think this needs a diagram, but here's some text that's a bit more explicit:

"If the air motion is fast enough, and if enough charged particles are present, these four distinct airflow segments will generate magnetic fields, and such fields will begin to influence the movement of the charged particles, by the magnetic pinch effect. And since the fields are far larger than the airflows themselves, the fields will overlap. In the overlapping areas, the net magnetic field won't have sharp corners — they'll be rounded. For example, where the entrainment meets the updraft, there would be more or less of a 90° turn. But at the corner, there will be two overlapping magnetic fields — one from the entrainment and one from the updraft. The net field will begin to turn upward when it comes into the influence of the updraft's field, and the rounded turn will be complete when the updraft's field is out of the influence of the entrainment's field. In this way, the net field from four perpendicular airflows becomes continuous and rounded. And this means that the magnetic pinch effect will encourage the charged particles to fall into a continuous toroidal loop."


Hang on a second -- I thought that the standard notation for Ampere's Law was that moving positive charges generate magnetic fields that accelerate magnetically-responsive particles by the right-hand rule. Is that not correct? Usually positive charges don't flow, but my understanding is that the notational convention was established before the elementary particles responsible for electric charges were discovered.


Actually, I am assuming that the water is magnetically-responsive. Not the water molecules, actually, but rather, the iron content (at 0.0034 ppm in seawater). But if I have the direction of the field wrong, I have to re-think the whole thing anyway.


Here again we see the limitations of my knowledge. I was simply thinking that anytime there is a force of any kind between two objects, the force will "act" on whichever one has less mass. Aside from the fact that I might have the direction of the fields wrong, in which case all of this would be moot, then the question is: would the back-pressure actually make the moving gas barrel-roll? The more I think about it, the more naive it sounds. But let's make sure I at least have the forces going in the right direction. Then I'll rethink this section.


I wasn't thinking that the water (or iron in it) is moving, so I wasn't thinking of an ExB drift that would do the accelerating. Rather, I was thinking of the iron molecules as little bar magnets. But the more I think about it, the less sure I am. I'll wait for your replies to my earlier comments, and start over from the beginning with this section.


OK, so I have more work to do -- what's new?


The proposal is that this field is generated by the moving charges within the tornado. I'll look at the wording.


Thank you so very much for your encouragement, and for the helpful nature of your criticisms. (If I had a dollar for every time I took an ad hominem attack, or had to wade through paragraphs of the fallacy of authority...)

I totally agree, that the first evidence of naivete on my part is the last sentence to ever be considered by that reader. This is why scientists don't do work like this. I'm biting off more than I can chew. There's no way to get through this much material, in this complex of a problem domain, without making a mistake, and it only takes one to discredit the entire work. This is not entirely unreasonable. With so much literature, why would you take the time to consider something written by someone obviously beyond the limits of his knowledge?

Despite the absurdity of the entire enterprise, there was a method to my madness. Seeing that 60 years and a billion dollars worth of scientific research still hadn't solved the problem, I decided to take a different tack. Instead of accuracy being the hard constraint, and comprehensiveness being a soft (or non-existent) constraint, I made comprehensiveness the hard constraint. Once a comprehensive framework was achieved, I then started ratcheting up the specificity. Every time an increase in accuracy revealed an error, the relevant aspects of the framework had to be disassembled and rebuilt to fix the problem. Early in the project, this usually revealed problems in other areas. I had the whole thing in pieces on the ground many times. But there was, in fact, a method. There may be many answers to one question, but entirely within one problem domain, there can only be one answer to many questions. If there are many data, especially of a very distinctive nature, comprehensiveness can make the better constraint. Using this method, I was able to narrow down the solution domain. In some cases (such as with the base of the tornado), there is only one possibility. In other cases (such as the mesocyclone), with respect to each datum there might have been many possibilities, but there was only one way to work through the whole thing with one construct. In other cases, multiple possibilities still exist, and I'm just going with a placeholder until more data are available, or I get the chance to do more literary research. And of course, in some cases I've taken a blind shot at something and I missed. But one by one, the errors are detected, and fixes are found. This is how the project got to this point. And this is where contributions from people like you are so valuable. I don't have the time to get formal education in all of the relevant disciplines. Nobody does, and perhaps that's why this problem hasn't been solved yet. But a collaborative effort involving constructive criticisms from people who do have knowledge in the various disciplines can accomplish what the individual cannot.

My sincerest thanks.

My fault. I have miscorrected you. The electron flow is what ultimately causes current but the electron flow is noted as opposite the flow of current. I am working with semiconducters right now and am thinking backwards. In this discipline you don't consider current as the energetic property but flow of electrons. Your diagram is therefore correct graphically as far as I can see.



it is correct. That notion is birthed in a concept of magnetic monopoles which do not exist. But if they did, you would indeed see acceleration of the molecule and therefore the water. Instead the poles accelerate conceptually until the magnetic poles are facing the direction of force and can go no further. What really is happening is the B field is placing a torque on the atomic level of materials with a high permeability (suspended iron in your case) and align all atoms such that the electron orbitals are all rotating the same direction. On the material level they aren't doing anything and no accelerations are taking place along the B field lines (zero net force). But even if there was magnetic monopoles present you still would not see a reaction between the air above the water and the water itself outside of surface friction. The idea that the rolling air as a product of these forces is unlikely as they are not part of the force interaction system.

As for charged particles, the right hand rule is used to describe acceleration of particles due to magnetic fields and initial motion. But it is not the same instance of using the right hand rule to describe the direction of the magnetic field from a known direction of current. I was led to think you were referring to Lorentz force as this is what "magnetic force" nomenclature is used to describe. If I am wrong, and there is a way to accelerate objects of high permeability along the magnetic field lines, I would like to see some documentation on it as this is something I have yet to learn.



That would be worthy of placing in your paper. As far as I can see this passes reason.



No. I do indeed understand the source of magnetic field. I do not doubt that there could be the presence of a magnetic field. I am skeptical that you could find a significant uniform magnetic field that points straight up with an area comparable to that of a cumulonimbus cloud base. If there are fluctuations, the gyro-radius will change. This conundrum does not discredit the notions you have made on this subject. I think there could be ways of explaining this but ultimately this principle is a possible outcome of much needed testing. I for one like the idea. It just need reinforcement.

At this point I think your paper (with adjustments) is strong enough to start moving to the next phase. You should at least start assembling a list of candidates for a focused research team and perhaps start talking to institutes for research grants. This way you are no longer restricted by the limits of your knowledge. I can think of several studies that were conducted at my university that were far less important and were well funded by grant money. This could have real applications in the electronic forecast industry.

Thank you for your efforts