Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
1–10 of 136 posts
Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
#2Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end.
Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with using obscure non-SI units?
Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
#3Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end. Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with using obscure non-SI units?
I agree in giving flak for using the term AA batteries in this context.
Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
#4Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end. Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with using obscure non-SI units?
Familiarity with the unit is important to gauge scale.
Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
#5Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end. Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with using obscure non-SI units?
Familiarity with the unit is important to gauge scale.
But familiarity gets more remote as you need larger and larger (or, smaller and smaller) multipliers. It's far more illustrative to say "the volume of a typical gas tank" than "the internal volume of hundred million poppy seeds", even though the volumes are in the same ballpark. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(voltage) says that high voltage substations are in 100 kV range and 25.5MV is "The largest man-made DC voltage – produced in a Van de Graaff generator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory" and gives me much better color than a "comparison" with 100 million batteries. (By the way, 100 million batteries stacked together is a bit over the length of one marathon - how many readers could easily tell you that just from the description alone? Much better to measure many lengths in marathons than 10^8's of battery lengths!)
Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
#6Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end. Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with using obscure non-SI units?
That's as strong as 175,000 electric eels!
Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
#7Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end. Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with using obscure non-SI units?
That's as strong as 175,000 electric eels!
Connected in series, obviously.
Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Familiarity with the unit is important to gauge scale.
But familiarity gets more remote as you need larger and larger (or, smaller and smaller) multipliers. It's far more illustrative to say "the volume of a typical gas tank" than "the internal volume of hundred million poppy seeds", even though the volumes are in the same ballpark. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(voltage) says that high voltage substations are in 100 kV range and 25.5MV i…
That's fair but the average person kinda knows how much (work/light/heat) a single AA battery can do/produce, but not what a substation can do.
Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
#9Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end. Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with using obscure non-SI units?
I assume they wanted a way to make it sound massive when it’s really not. Like, that’s about enough to run the average American household for 10 years, but we have power plants that supply multiples of that daily.
Re: Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
#10Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end. Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with using obscure non-SI units?
That's as strong as 175,000 electric eels!
The proper units for electric field would be voltage per unit length. Fortunately an electric eel has both a voltage and a length, so it could be eels per eel.