Hurricanes, Whirlpools and Natural Gyres.
Created | Updated May 27, 2003
Hurricanes, Whirlpools and Natural Gyres.
Statistics, data and all that trash:
Whirlpools are a fairly common occurrence in certain parts of the planet earth. Followers of my recent studies off this planet will be familiar with my other findings and will understand at once my reason for coming to this one. There is every reason to suppose that there is a connection between them and the phenomenon known as hurricanes.
In the northern latitudes of Europe cyclones are not so well appreciated as they are in tropical and subtropical climes. This is no doubt due to their more frequent occurrence and due to that fact, their lack of spectacular effect.
Traditionally homes in the tropics were made of straw. More recent techniques have made hurricanes the deadly events the media so love these days. (A problem compounded by the increase in crime over the last century. It is due to the threat of robberies that homes have become sturdy and due to hurricanes are to be made more sturdy. Unfortunately the planet is exceedingly sick at the moment and increasing the weight of the domicile is producing diminishing returns due to the fact hurricanes appear to be getting stronger.)
Whether these storms are getting stronger or it is just a matter of Earthlings now having better and more measuring instruments and techniques is a matter for conjecture and as with the increases in damage done for the reasons above and for the lack of data Earthlings themselves supply, it impossible to make comparisons. I do not propose to try. I will cite one recent example.
When Hurricane Andrew came ashore it found out all the substandard construction work that had taken place in the recent housing boom. The immense damage bill for that event brought about stricter housing codes and consequently, higher estate values. Further damage from more recent hurricanes has caused incomparable damage due to the relative differences in the property values and due to the costs of insuring such properties which in turn has lead to a change in the type of property and customer base in the regions.
When the homes in a traditionally poor paid area is taken over by relatively richer residents, the property values change and thus there is no way that damage statistics can be relied on.
Geostrophic winds:
These winds conform to a pattern described by the equations:
fu = -1/p ap/ay; and: fv = 1/p ap/ax. Where an understanding of ancient Greek is a constant.
If that was not all Greek to you, the understanding is further compounded by the effect of adding in a phenomenon known as the Coriolis Force. This so called geostrophic flow model shows why cyclones in the northern hemisphere flow counter-clockwise about their centre and those in the southern hemisphere flow clockwise.
It helps to be at the top of your tree when making these statements, as it tends to put off monkeys from further down asking silly questions. (It is a well known fact that people on Earth will not disagree with anything they can not understand. In fact it is a tenet of most of their faiths that the more unlikely and unprovable the event is, the more sure followers a religion will be and the more fervent –even violent, these adherents will be. Fortunately for all concerned, the idea of arguing is alien to them and the imposition of ostracism and even death sentences for those with the ability to think has maintained the status quo.)
You can brush aside any references to cyclones from outside the equatorial belt as “extra tropical cyclones” and speak disparagingly of them as “large eddies in the broad air currents that flow in the general direction of west to east.”
(Monkeys love to be given something for nothing and “extra tropical” sounds both free and exotic. And what does a general direction matter on such broad air anyway?)
Monkeys believe that the Sun provides all the heat their planet requires; directly and with no reference to input from the complex interchange that an engine the size of a solar system would generate. No small number of them view it as a deity to which human sacrifice is properly devoted. Apparently a baby is sacrificed in the coldest part of the year in northern climes -in every community large enough to have a communal house and also an old man is forced to die in the fire-place of every household that has one. This must cause a certain scarcity value among their wise men.
Hurricanes:
Despite the fact that hurricanes are storms that move in a more east to west direction than across latitudes, their wise men insist they play an important role in the distribution of solar heat. Apparently none have seen fit to question this explanation, despite the fact that hurricanes follow the distribution of storm clouds which tend to occlude the sun for several days.
How they explain the heat build-up in such circumstances defies logic, for their paths tend to vary little at first from the latitude on which they are seeded – despite a build up of heat. At the same time as all this takes place, vast quantities of water are being evpourated in what should be a cooling process and in its trail just as great a quantity of water is being deposited.
Despite any opinions to the contrary, hurricanes are waves in the atmosphere travelling the face of the planet just as surely as its high and low tides in the seas.
Tropical cyclones form in the region of 10 to 15 degrees north and south of the Equator. They are intense regions of low pressure some 60 to 300 miles wide travelling along a weather front. In this way they are no different to the lows that come into Britain from the Atlantic.
It would be wrong to say that the mechanism for their formation is fully understood but what seems to happen runs along these lines:
On occasions when the atmosphere is relatively undisturbed in the lower reaches, pockets of dissimilar pressures and temperatures build up. Quite why this should happen is not clear. (If it were "insolation" evidence might be that the high pressure is always under the sun and the low twelve hours different (or vice versa) which would put them in diferent Oceans.)
Where a mass of warm air abuts a mass of cold air, they begin to move around each other. Again the logical way this should happen is for them to form layers with the cooler air below the warm.
However when the masses are of the same height and they reach high enough (remember that the resultant is a cyclone with a diameter of 60 to 300 miles) adiabatic processes come into play.
When a volume of air rises it expands. The expansion cools the vortex and it loses water. It is now cooler and heavier and so wants to fall back to earth.
It can’t as the current is rising.
You now have an unstable column. The cool and warm vortices begin to move around each other. This is the second unexplained fact: They move in an anticlockwise direction in the northern hemisphere and a clockwise direction around each other in the southern.
The reason for this is called the Coriolis Force. It is the only force that does not produce acceleration by direct application. Rather -in the manner of their religion, the monkeys explain this by appealing to (relatively long (for cause and effect in dynamics) periods of) time.
[[[[What would be extreme useful at this point is a pictures or two about what is going on. As they would require some familiarity with weather maps it may not be a terrible problem if the offices of the Guide are devoid of such.]]]]
Going Up:
Whether the atmosphere was divided into sections for our convenience by God or Man is a matter for debate. (Of course, if God is a bigger monkey then according to the creed of the Darwinists, he built heaven upside-down. (Or He lives in Australia perhaps?))
The section that concerns the weather is defined as the troposphere. The top of this is called the tropopause. It is something like 10 or 15 miles high. Although an hurricane can vary in size from 60 to 300 miles in diameter, it does not get much taller than 15 miles. (You can call it 20 if you like we are still talking about a vortex somewhere between forty thousand and one and an half million cubic miles of air. And that is just the hurricane bit. The masses either side of the fronts are indescribably vast.)
The hurricane acts as a giant suction tube, although it is stretching semantics to call it hyperbole, this siphon draws off millions of tons of water every hour from the oceans and deposits it in the layer of atmosphere directly above: The Stratosphere.
As with a refrigerator or the compression of air in a pump, temperatures change with pressure. At certain low pressures water comes out of the air. It forms snow or ice. This either falls back, down into the cyclone and falls as rain or turns into hail and either falls as large raindrops (melted hail) or as hail. OR it may get carried away. The stratosphere is the region in which the jet-streams run. They are closely associated with cyclones and may reach speeds between 90 and 400 mph.
The sea contains salt too; something like 37 grams per litre. At about 37,000 tons per million tons of brine that is a lot of salt. This is "sedimented out" (is separated) from the water when the water evapourates. At the top end of this column, the water is so pure that it will not freeze at ordinary temperatures. Down here at a pressure of 15 pounds per square inch, pure water freezes at 40 degrees below zero. It is not possible to say at what temperatures water freezes in the upper regions.
We do know that that when the pressure is low enough it will evapourate, even though it may be at its freezing point.
Water as a gas is lighter than air. Salt is not. What it is though, is a freezing agent when mixed with ice. And if caught up with the hail tumbling over and over in the cloud it produces its own weird sciences. No one can really say what is happening in the centre of these clouds but obviously the hail forms above the region that is full of salt, otherwise a substantial proportion of hail would be saline.
We do know that not only are there powerful dynamics going on in them but the electricity they produce is astounding.
Jet-Streams:
Jet-steams tend to run parallel to the warm front and although it is not known which gives birth to what (or if they occur at the same time for another reason yet to be discovered) it is no doubt their direction that gives the impetus to the path of the hurricane. (As with tornadoes, hurricanes are forming along the line of the fronts.)
Since no evapouration or condensation takes place in the stratosphere the run of the jets is unimpeded by the need to climb or sink imposed by temperatures. They find unimpeded paths around the globe that change only with the spells of the weather. As the temperature has a steady gradient the sun has a directly proportional relationship to the temperature of the air there.
The warmest portions obviously are at the top. Just above the clouds (at the tropopause) the temperature is likely to be minus 80 degrees centigrade. At the top of the stratosphere (some 30 miles up) it is likely to be zero.
I had to stop for a rethink about these monkeys when I came across this theory:
I came across the following theory in Google groups. I have tried to contact the author but to no avail. Here is an edited piece of the theory that appears on his site. My words are in brackets = ().
There are a number of good references (Snow 1984, and Davies-Jones 1995) that describe the meteorology leading up to the development of the tornado but....a void in explanations for the fully developed tornado.
The tornado, in essence, is a very strong vortex with one end attached to the ground and the other end extending upward to a varying or undefined height. This configuration suggests to the aerodynamicist that there are vortex lines concentrated in the core of the tornado, that are splayed out radially in all directions on the ground.
The vortex lines are diffused upward into the clouds only to turn downward and connect up with the vortex lines on the ground at some remote distance from the tornado. The whole vortex field appears to be a toroid with one end flattened by the ground. This picture is based on the aerodynamic theory that vortex lines must close on themselves and cannot be unconnected.
The generation of a strong vortex requires strong velocity gradients and most strong vortices are usually created by the interaction between an established fluid flow and a solid surface. On a wing, for example, there is an array of vortex lines of one polarity generated by the boundary layer on the upper surface and another array of opposite polarity generated by the boundary layer on the lower surface.
(On an airplane’s wing the two different strengths of vortex lines combine to give the plane lift and leave a rotating eddy in its wake. The lift and the eddy are not self generating; the wind is totally dependent on the engine or some other outside source.)
Somewhere along the closed loop of vortex lines of the tornado there is an energy source. (Contemporary theory is in error because with) normal aerodynamic principles there cannot be strong velocity gradients in free air, because there is no mechanism to support them.
Energy density decreases with distance from the source. This is decreed by the second law of thermodynamics. Since the most energetic location of the rotational kinetic energy of the tornado is at its base, this is the location of the source of this energy.
(The forces driving and holding together a tornado must be equal and opposite or it would just fly apart.)
If we know the velocity profile, we can calculate the shear or retarding force. In the air, the shear force is very weak because the air viscosity is very small. Calculations show that the power for a tornado in air with a simple velocity profile with a maximum velocity of 90 meters/sec (295 ft/sec) and a radius of 30.5 meters (100 ft) and a height of 305 meters (1000 ft) is of the order of 1 horsepower.
However, calculations of the drag horsepower of a turbulent boundary layer of the same velocity profile (as described above) when the tornado is on the ground, yields tens of thousands of horsepower.
What is the driving force at the air/ground interface? One element of the tornado that has been considered in the past is the considerable electrical activity associated with the storm that generates the tornado [Vonnegut 1960, Whiting 1964, and Davies- Jones 1975]. The driving source of the tornado is a toroidal electric current field.
Air conductivity increases as the air pressure falls. The inflow (or outflow) of current, in air, to the base of the tornado core is almost at right angles to the earth's magnetic field and the interaction of the two provides a tangential J x B force. This is the same force that drives electric motors and would imply that the tornado is a "natural" electric motor. This force is composed of an electric current density: J and a magnetic field: B.
One difference between the toroidal vorticity field (the theory currently accepted by meteorologists) and the toroidal current field (the theory being proposed by the author: Wallace Luchuk) is that at the ground/air interface, the vorticity lines cannot penetrate the earth, while the electric current lines can.
One other difference that must be mentioned here is that the subsonic aerodynamic field adjusts itself to meteorological perturbations at the speed of sound, while the electric field adjusts itself to electrical field perturbations at close to the speed of light.
Satellite data has revealed that lightning in the vicinity of a tornado mysteriously ceases when the tornado is being spawned. If the toroidal current stays in the air a nascent tornado may appear, because it does not require much power to sustain a tornado in air.
However when the tornado touches down, the tornado becomes very powerful. Air conductivity is about 6 x 10-14 mhos/meter (Nat. Acad. Press. 1986) while the ground conductivity is about 10 x 10-3 mhos/meter (Weeks. 1964).
(There is always a snag isn’t there:)
If the proposed theory is true, it should be possible to detect and determine the tornado strength by measuring ground currents over an area surrounding the tornado. The ground current around a tornado should be in a radial or a partially radial pattern. The center of this radial pattern should locate the tornado and the direction of the current (inward or outward) should reveal the direction of rotation of the tornado.
(If they could be predicted in the time required for that experiment, they wouldn’t be the problem they are.)
One other implication of the theory is that if the earth’s magnetic field is a requirement, then there should be no tornadoes (or waterspouts) along the earth's magnetic equator, because the earth's magnetic field (being a dipole) would be horizontal there.
Also if the tornado strength is a function of magnetic field strength and current density, there should be a correlation between areas with the strongest magnetic field strengths and ground conductivities and the strongest tornadoes.
The full theory along with diagrammes and equations and the author's e-mail can be found at www.cafes.net/wallytul/
Statistics, data and all that trash:
Whirlpools are a fairly common occurrence in certain parts of the planet earth. Followers of my recent studies off this planet will be familiar with my other findings and will understand at once my reason for coming to this one. There is every reason to suppose that there is a connection between them and the phenomenon known as hurricanes.
In the northern latitudes of Europe cyclones are not so well appreciated as they are in tropical and subtropical climes. This is no doubt due to their more frequent occurrence and due to that fact, their lack of spectacular effect.
Traditionally homes in the tropics were made of straw. More recent techniques have made hurricanes the deadly events the media so love these days. (A problem compounded by the increase in crime over the last century. It is due to the threat of robberies that homes have become sturdy and due to hurricanes are to be made more sturdy. Unfortunately the planet is exceedingly sick at the moment and increasing the weight of the domicile is producing diminishing returns due to the fact hurricanes appear to be getting stronger.)
Whether these storms are getting stronger or it is just a matter of Earthlings now having better and more measuring instruments and techniques is a matter for conjecture and as with the increases in damage done for the reasons above and for the lack of data Earthlings themselves supply, it impossible to make comparisons. I do not propose to try. I will cite one recent example.
When Hurricane Andrew came ashore it found out all the substandard construction work that had taken place in the recent housing boom. The immense damage bill for that event brought about stricter housing codes and consequently, higher estate values. Further damage from more recent hurricanes has caused incomparable damage due to the relative differences in the property values and due to the costs of insuring such properties which in turn has lead to a change in the type of property and customer base in the regions.
When the homes in a traditionally poor paid area is taken over by relatively richer residents, the property values change and thus there is no way that damage statistics can be relied on.
Geostrophic winds:
These winds conform to a pattern described by the equations:
fu = -1/p ap/ay; and: fv = 1/p ap/ax. Where an understanding of ancient Greek is a constant.
If that was not all Greek to you, the understanding is further compounded by the effect of adding in a phenomenon known as the Coriolis Force. This so called geostrophic flow model shows why cyclones in the northern hemisphere flow counter-clockwise about their centre and those in the southern hemisphere flow clockwise.
It helps to be at the top of your tree when making these statements, as it tends to put off monkeys from further down asking silly questions. (It is a well known fact that people on Earth will not disagree with anything they can not understand. In fact it is a tenet of most of their faiths that the more unlikely and unprovable the event is, the more sure followers a religion will be and the more fervent –even violent, these adherents will be. Fortunately for all concerned, the idea of arguing is alien to them and the imposition of ostracism and even death sentences for those with the ability to think has maintained the status quo.)
You can brush aside any references to cyclones from outside the equatorial belt as “extra tropical cyclones” and speak disparagingly of them as “large eddies in the broad air currents that flow in the general direction of west to east.”
(Monkeys love to be given something for nothing and “extra tropical” sounds both free and exotic. And what does a general direction matter on such broad air anyway?)
Monkeys believe that the Sun provides all the heat their planet requires; directly and with no reference to input from the complex interchange that an engine the size of a solar system would generate. No small number of them view it as a deity to which human sacrifice is properly devoted. Apparently a baby is sacrificed in the coldest part of the year in northern climes -in every community large enough to have a communal house and also an old man is forced to die in the fire-place of every household that has one. This must cause a certain scarcity value among their wise men.
Hurricanes:
Despite the fact that hurricanes are storms that move in a more east to west direction than across latitudes, their wise men insist they play an important role in the distribution of solar heat. Apparently none have seen fit to question this explanation, despite the fact that hurricanes follow the distribution of storm clouds which tend to occlude the sun for several days.
How they explain the heat build-up in such circumstances defies logic, for their paths tend to vary little at first from the latitude on which they are seeded – despite a build up of heat. At the same time as all this takes place, vast quantities of water are being evpourated in what should be a cooling process and in its trail just as great a quantity of water is being deposited.
Despite any opinions to the contrary, hurricanes are waves in the atmosphere travelling the face of the planet just as surely as its high and low tides in the seas.
Tropical cyclones form in the region of 10 to 15 degrees north and south of the Equator. They are intense regions of low pressure some 60 to 300 miles wide travelling along a weather front. In this way they are no different to the lows that come into Britain from the Atlantic.
It would be wrong to say that the mechanism for their formation is fully understood but what seems to happen runs along these lines:
On occasions when the atmosphere is relatively undisturbed in the lower reaches, pockets of dissimilar pressures and temperatures build up. Quite why this should happen is not clear. (If it were "insolation" evidence might be that the high pressure is always under the sun and the low twelve hours different (or vice versa) which would put them in diferent Oceans.)
Where a mass of warm air abuts a mass of cold air, they begin to move around each other. Again the logical way this should happen is for them to form layers with the cooler air below the warm.
However when the masses are of the same height and they reach high enough (remember that the resultant is a cyclone with a diameter of 60 to 300 miles) adiabatic processes come into play.
When a volume of air rises it expands. The expansion cools the vortex and it loses water. It is now cooler and heavier and so wants to fall back to earth.
It can’t as the current is rising.
You now have an unstable column. The cool and warm vortices begin to move around each other. This is the second unexplained fact: They move in an anticlockwise direction in the northern hemisphere and a clockwise direction around each other in the southern.
The reason for this is called the Coriolis Force. It is the only force that does not produce acceleration by direct application. Rather -in the manner of their religion, the monkeys explain this by appealing to (relatively long (for cause and effect in dynamics) periods of) time.
[[[[What would be extreme useful at this point is a pictures or two about what is going on. As they would require some familiarity with weather maps it may not be a terrible problem if the offices of the Guide are devoid of such.]]]]
Going Up:
Whether the atmosphere was divided into sections for our convenience by God or Man is a matter for debate. (Of course, if God is a bigger monkey then according to the creed of the Darwinists, he built heaven upside-down. (Or He lives in Australia perhaps?))
The section that concerns the weather is defined as the troposphere. The top of this is called the tropopause. It is something like 10 or 15 miles high. Although an hurricane can vary in size from 60 to 300 miles in diameter, it does not get much taller than 15 miles. (You can call it 20 if you like we are still talking about a vortex somewhere between forty thousand and one and an half million cubic miles of air. And that is just the hurricane bit. The masses either side of the fronts are indescribably vast.)
The hurricane acts as a giant suction tube, although it is stretching semantics to call it hyperbole, this siphon draws off millions of tons of water every hour from the oceans and deposits it in the layer of atmosphere directly above: The Stratosphere.
As with a refrigerator or the compression of air in a pump, temperatures change with pressure. At certain low pressures water comes out of the air. It forms snow or ice. This either falls back, down into the cyclone and falls as rain or turns into hail and either falls as large raindrops (melted hail) or as hail. OR it may get carried away. The stratosphere is the region in which the jet-streams run. They are closely associated with cyclones and may reach speeds between 90 and 400 mph.
The sea contains salt too; something like 37 grams per litre. At about 37,000 tons per million tons of brine that is a lot of salt. This is "sedimented out" (is separated) from the water when the water evapourates. At the top end of this column, the water is so pure that it will not freeze at ordinary temperatures. Down here at a pressure of 15 pounds per square inch, pure water freezes at 40 degrees below zero. It is not possible to say at what temperatures water freezes in the upper regions.
We do know that that when the pressure is low enough it will evapourate, even though it may be at its freezing point.
Water as a gas is lighter than air. Salt is not. What it is though, is a freezing agent when mixed with ice. And if caught up with the hail tumbling over and over in the cloud it produces its own weird sciences. No one can really say what is happening in the centre of these clouds but obviously the hail forms above the region that is full of salt, otherwise a substantial proportion of hail would be saline.
We do know that not only are there powerful dynamics going on in them but the electricity they produce is astounding.
Jet-Streams:
Jet-steams tend to run parallel to the warm front and although it is not known which gives birth to what (or if they occur at the same time for another reason yet to be discovered) it is no doubt their direction that gives the impetus to the path of the hurricane. (As with tornadoes, hurricanes are forming along the line of the fronts.)
Since no evapouration or condensation takes place in the stratosphere the run of the jets is unimpeded by the need to climb or sink imposed by temperatures. They find unimpeded paths around the globe that change only with the spells of the weather. As the temperature has a steady gradient the sun has a directly proportional relationship to the temperature of the air there.
The warmest portions obviously are at the top. Just above the clouds (at the tropopause) the temperature is likely to be minus 80 degrees centigrade. At the top of the stratosphere (some 30 miles up) it is likely to be zero.
I had to stop for a rethink about these monkeys when I came across this theory:
I came across the following theory in Google groups. I have tried to contact the author but to no avail. Here is an edited piece of the theory that appears on his site. My words are in brackets = ().
There are a number of good references (Snow 1984, and Davies-Jones 1995) that describe the meteorology leading up to the development of the tornado but....a void in explanations for the fully developed tornado.
The tornado, in essence, is a very strong vortex with one end attached to the ground and the other end extending upward to a varying or undefined height. This configuration suggests to the aerodynamicist that there are vortex lines concentrated in the core of the tornado, that are splayed out radially in all directions on the ground.
The vortex lines are diffused upward into the clouds only to turn downward and connect up with the vortex lines on the ground at some remote distance from the tornado. The whole vortex field appears to be a toroid with one end flattened by the ground. This picture is based on the aerodynamic theory that vortex lines must close on themselves and cannot be unconnected.
The generation of a strong vortex requires strong velocity gradients and most strong vortices are usually created by the interaction between an established fluid flow and a solid surface. On a wing, for example, there is an array of vortex lines of one polarity generated by the boundary layer on the upper surface and another array of opposite polarity generated by the boundary layer on the lower surface.
(On an airplane’s wing the two different strengths of vortex lines combine to give the plane lift and leave a rotating eddy in its wake. The lift and the eddy are not self generating; the wind is totally dependent on the engine or some other outside source.)
Somewhere along the closed loop of vortex lines of the tornado there is an energy source. (Contemporary theory is in error because with) normal aerodynamic principles there cannot be strong velocity gradients in free air, because there is no mechanism to support them.
Energy density decreases with distance from the source. This is decreed by the second law of thermodynamics. Since the most energetic location of the rotational kinetic energy of the tornado is at its base, this is the location of the source of this energy.
(The forces driving and holding together a tornado must be equal and opposite or it would just fly apart.)
If we know the velocity profile, we can calculate the shear or retarding force. In the air, the shear force is very weak because the air viscosity is very small. Calculations show that the power for a tornado in air with a simple velocity profile with a maximum velocity of 90 meters/sec (295 ft/sec) and a radius of 30.5 meters (100 ft) and a height of 305 meters (1000 ft) is of the order of 1 horsepower.
However, calculations of the drag horsepower of a turbulent boundary layer of the same velocity profile (as described above) when the tornado is on the ground, yields tens of thousands of horsepower.
What is the driving force at the air/ground interface? One element of the tornado that has been considered in the past is the considerable electrical activity associated with the storm that generates the tornado [Vonnegut 1960, Whiting 1964, and Davies- Jones 1975]. The driving source of the tornado is a toroidal electric current field.
Air conductivity increases as the air pressure falls. The inflow (or outflow) of current, in air, to the base of the tornado core is almost at right angles to the earth's magnetic field and the interaction of the two provides a tangential J x B force. This is the same force that drives electric motors and would imply that the tornado is a "natural" electric motor. This force is composed of an electric current density: J and a magnetic field: B.
One difference between the toroidal vorticity field (the theory currently accepted by meteorologists) and the toroidal current field (the theory being proposed by the author: Wallace Luchuk) is that at the ground/air interface, the vorticity lines cannot penetrate the earth, while the electric current lines can.
One other difference that must be mentioned here is that the subsonic aerodynamic field adjusts itself to meteorological perturbations at the speed of sound, while the electric field adjusts itself to electrical field perturbations at close to the speed of light.
Satellite data has revealed that lightning in the vicinity of a tornado mysteriously ceases when the tornado is being spawned. If the toroidal current stays in the air a nascent tornado may appear, because it does not require much power to sustain a tornado in air.
However when the tornado touches down, the tornado becomes very powerful. Air conductivity is about 6 x 10-14 mhos/meter (Nat. Acad. Press. 1986) while the ground conductivity is about 10 x 10-3 mhos/meter (Weeks. 1964).
(There is always a snag isn’t there:)
If the proposed theory is true, it should be possible to detect and determine the tornado strength by measuring ground currents over an area surrounding the tornado. The ground current around a tornado should be in a radial or a partially radial pattern. The center of this radial pattern should locate the tornado and the direction of the current (inward or outward) should reveal the direction of rotation of the tornado.
(If they could be predicted in the time required for that experiment, they wouldn’t be the problem they are.)
One other implication of the theory is that if the earth’s magnetic field is a requirement, then there should be no tornadoes (or waterspouts) along the earth's magnetic equator, because the earth's magnetic field (being a dipole) would be horizontal there.
Also if the tornado strength is a function of magnetic field strength and current density, there should be a correlation between areas with the strongest magnetic field strengths and ground conductivities and the strongest tornadoes.
The full theory along with diagrammes and equations and the author's e-mail can be found at www.cafes.net/wallytul/
