Thunderstorm charging: Laboratory experiments clarified

Further laboratory experiments of thunderstorm charging by ice crystal collisions with riming graupel pellets have led to results that may help account for a major difference between two independent studies reported earlier. The problem concerns values of the cloud liquid water content required to change the sign of graupel charging. The present work has noted and investigated differences in the techniques of cloud nucleation used in the two studies. In one set of measurements by Takahashi, ice crystals are nucleated continuously in a supercooled water droplet cloud, while in the other experiments by Jayaratne et al. and Saunders et al., the droplet cloud is nucleated only briefly. These two nucleation methods lead to differences in the mass of cloud particles collected on a sampling probe used to determine the liquid water content of the cloud. In the continuous nucleation case, the probe collects sufficient numbers of ice crystals to lead to a substantial overestimate of the cloud liquid water content.