Fire and Water

There certainly is no shortage of dust in the air on a given day, I think it is more dependent on actual moisture content percentage than anything...as the warm air rises the higher you go the cooler it gets and at some point hits dew point and the water droplets combine until the weight becomes heavier than air, and a raindrop forms...

Every drop of rain has a particle at it's core from birth.No particles of dust,salt,or smoke=no rain.Clouds are seeded in some parts of the world to produce rain,using silver iodide crystals.Plenty of clouds above but no rain without seeding them.

Scientists could shut down a hurricane with modern chemical formulations,by causing it to lose all of it's energy to rain over the ocean,but they are afraid of the global impact of this.Hurricanes are nature's heat engine to try to redistribute heat from the equator towards the poles.

I was speaking of the amount of smoke particles on a global scale,not a local scale or near the fire.

There have been monumental fires world wide in numbers not previously recorded.

These fires have put more particulates in the atmosphere,which give more opportunity to form rain.

Sadly,the rain is not uniformly distributed.

Could the increased smoke particulate have caused flooding in Europe?

I wonder why more moisture could be in the global atmosphere?

Who could've predicted this?

"With the proliferation of fires recently, it is logical to expect more rain than usual"

It would be great if the smoke would cause enough rain immediately to put the fire out...

Actually, the opposite may result. Smoke in the air may precipitate tiny droplets that never coalesce into droplets that are large enough to fall as rain. Another effect is the reduction of sunshine due to reflection from the smoke resulting in less evaporation from surface bodies of water, according to this article.

Smoking Out the Rain | Science | AAAS (sciencemag.org)

Your logic is flawed.

"For reasons which are not well understood, Pyrocumulus clouds tend to have the opposite charge structure to normal thunderclouds. This charge inversion is associated with unusually powerful cloud-to-ground lightning – which can start yet more fires."

This came from Popular Mechanics, but there are many more references.

I was speaking of a global,not a local effect.

Global warming is the reason for more moisture in the air and more latent heat is absorbed by the water as it evaporates.

The Earth's atmosphere contains 37.5 million-billion gallons of water vapor – enough to cover the entire surface of the planet with 1 inch of rain if condensed.

Polar ice does likewise when it melts into water.

The Earth has the ability to regulate it's temperature over the long term as long as water exists in sufficient quantities all 3 states,the first stage being ice.

The solar seasons also have an effect,running in approximately 22 year cycles.

I remember times when farmers were buying irrigation equipment at a furious rate,then approximately 20 years later,the were selling it at basement level prices because it was not needed anymore.

Approximately 20 years later,the cycle repeated.

IMHO:

There are advantages in aging,in that you can remember cycles rather than relying on agenda oriented journalism,(not just in weather.)

I think the money would be better applied to solar and wind incentives.

Solar has the least cost per KWH,but utilities want to charge more for choosing it.

That is a disincentive.Pay more for that "feel good feeling".

In Hawaii the utilities charge for putting excess energy into the grid.It is cheaper there to dump your excess energy into a resistive load,or cover your solar cells.

It certainly makes the stockholders feel good,who really don't care about the Earth,as long as it lasts through their tour on Earth.

They are buying it cheaper,and trying to sell it much higher than other sources.

I realize the need for profit,but this is pure greed.

If the utilities were really interested in the environment,they would sell solar at a discount.

The current changes in our weather are part of a pattern that has been amplified by man's effect,and are happening too fast for the Earth to catch up.

When all of the ice melts,we will have a real problem,unless the sun goes into another solar minimum stage.

If it does,the global warming may turn out to have been an unpredictable advantage.

You have a variety of misunderstandings in this reply.

"... It is cheaper there to dump your excess energy into a resistive load, or cover your solar cells."

You don't have to cover solar cells when excess energy is available from them. Covering them for protective storage may be a good idea but "excess" energy is just not used.

"The Earth's atmosphere contains 37.5 million-billion gallons of water vapor – enough to cover the entire surface of the planet with 1 inch of rain if condensed.

Polar ice does likewise when it melts into water."

Your uncited volume of water vapor is so ambiguous as to become meaningless. Is this volume of the air containing some unstated minimum partial pressure concentration of water vapor, possibly pure water vapor?

The Antarctic ice sheet alone is 26.5 million cubic kilometers of ice. This frozen volume will become much more than one inch of water around the globe if it completely melted. The rise of the Antarctica landmass will complicate this analysis.

Reference is here:https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/science/how-much-water-there-earth?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects

IF you have a VERY good regulator in your charging system,you do not have to worry about overcharging the batteries.

I was not speaking of all of the water on Earth,only that in the atmosphere.

Any learned person knows there is more fresh water at the poles,so I did not feel the need to mention it, which would be stating the obvious,and which would also be off-topic, since I was speaking about water vapor in the atmosphere and rain,and the effect of smoke particles contributing to global rain quantity.

If one does not have a good regulator in a battery charging system then premature battery failure will likely happen regardless of the energy source. This was addressed in my reference about covering solar panels.

According to your USGS reference and an online volume calculator, the 12,900 cubic kilometers of atmospheric water convert to about 3.41*10^15 US gallons. You are off by a little more than an order of magnitude from your reference. This could be due to a calculator entry error or you originally calculated from a different reference for this difficult to quantify water volume.

As for the polar ice, what does it likewise do?

Here is a link to my original volume reference:

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+much+water+in+the+atmosphere%3F

Insofar as the polar ice caps,within the context of my original post:

Earth exists in a triple point state at different locations and altitudes.

Ref:https://www.topperlearning.com/answer/define-triple-point-of-water-why-is-it-unique/km8b3utss

Ice,water,and water vapor exist simultaneously.If the temperature increases,more of the ice melts,more of the water evaporates,and the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere increases.Likewise,the opposite happens if the temperature decreases.

The 3 states of water act to regulate the Earth's temperature via latent heat exchange.

More water vapor+more smoke particles=more potential rain.

If the heat increases to the point that there is no ice,then some of the ability to absorb and regulate heat is lost,and the temperature will continue to increase until there is no liquid water,and eventually no water vapor.

Of course by then it won't matter to us.

Your statement "and eventually no water vapor." is false, unless you are equating "water vapor" to water in the visible condensed (but not coalesced into rain) state. In the gaseous state it is invisible to the naked eye.

Approximately a 10°C rise in air temperature permits nearly a doubling of the capacity of the air to contain water in the gaseous state. Look for this in any standard book that gives absolute humidity as a function of air temperature. So, as the air continues to get hotter the effect is to increase its ability to hold water as a gas, until -- as you correctly imply -- all water currently on the earth's surface can be contained as a gas, and rain ceases to occur. The other possibility of loss of water into the vacuum of space is an irreversible phenomenon. Perhaps a physicist among us could state the required air temperature for the molecular speed of water to exceed the escape velocity of the earth's atmosphere. That would be the upper limit to how much water could be contained in the atmosphere.

The resource you mentioned in an earlier post perpetuates an error in the sums because it does not allow for the errors inherent in the individual components. Any of the stated values, giving numbers to 4 or more significant figures should have been rounded to two, at best. There is no reliable way to quantify the water content of the oceans, rivers, lakes, earth's crust, and ice sheets to better than 1% (or perhaps 0.5%) accuracy.

--JMM

If smoke particles are nuclei for water vapor to condense on and thus produce rain, wouldn't that rain be downwind of the smoke generator? Then, how far downwind?

Quite a few decades ago the volcano Krakatoa exploded putting lots of dust in the atmosphere; in the following months was there more rain? I don't have the data to answer this (nor the time to search for it!)

Once the smoke reaches the jet stream,it only takes approximately 3 days to circle the planet,so the effects could be seen anywhere.

I understand what is happening,and I do not have the time or desire to research your questions if you don't have the time..Learn how to use Google efficiently when you have time,and you may increase your understanding.

SE is very good at finding even very obscure information,and he has very graciously helped me a lot.

Learn how to use Google

I try not to use Google--I don't want to give them all that free advertising. Instead, I use DuckDuckGo.

Yes, the search skills of SE are great. I keep trying, but apparently I am not skilled at asking the correct question! It's frustrating!

Practice,Practice,Practice!

You will get better by keen observation of others' methods.

SE has helped me a lot in this manner.

My memory is that Krakatoa's massive eruption was in 1883 or thereabouts, and was followed by unusally heavy rainfall on the West Coast of the USA. An earlier eruption of another volcano in 1815 was followed by what was called "the year without a summer" in New England, USA--snow fell in every month.

--JMM

As I recall from my junior college geology class report, that preceding volcano was Tambora, in Indonesia.

Krakatoa ejected some 5 cubic kilometers of (ejecta, mostly pumice) that circled the earth for almost three years, and which sound waves circled the earth more than six times. A dirty rainfall did deluge the west coast for a relatively short while, but mostly just darkened the sky.

So-called ''baby Krakatoa is still (growing up)...