Aberrations or Revelations?

C. R. B. JOYCE
1966 Nature  
NATURE 441 lower temperature, the former giving rise to minute, positively charged splinters to be blown upwards relative to the larger rime-covered and negatively-charged hail. On the other were Workman and his colleagues from New Mexico, equally convinced that the charging arises from multitudinous contacts between hailstones and already frozen drops of water. Argument was quickly switched, therefore, to such evidence as there is about the scale of the two different activities and about the
more » ... lieu in which they occur. The key question which soon emerged was to what extent the thundercloud can accumulate charge of one polarity in one region and of the opposite polarity in another. As Dr. Ross Gunn was to emphasize, full understanding can come only when we have reliable determinations of the nature and the concentrations of the various charge carriers as well as their velocities. Existing evidence is little more than speculation and the difficult task of distinguishing between the two schools (not to mention a third claimant, Dr. Vonnegut, who has propounded a purely convective theory of the thunderstorm) now lies with the meteorologists. At the present time, in the words of Exodus IX, verse 24, we arc left, with "hail, and fire mingled with the hail, very grievous". On the second major question an important paper was presented by E. C. Whipple, jun., on the electrification between the troposphere and the bottom of the D layer of the ionosphere, a region inaccessible to balloons and difficult to explore from rockets, which disturb the local environment. This is, however, considered the outstanding task for space-vehicles. The day is not far distant when the problems of the dusty atmosphere of Venus and the gigantic atmosphere of Jupiter with its turbulent red spot will present new targets for our ingenuity. In the meantime we have, as an urgent task, to study intensively the language of the radio-emissions from both of them with earth-bound equipment. A peaceful battle was followed by a feast of informative papers. Many will be stimulated by them. All are worth reading. BASIL ScHONLAND
doi:10.1038/209441a0 fatcat:fxlic36agnfbpizvzxdqbgmiuu