Lightning declines over shipping lanes following regulation of sulfur emissions

[lentoutcry]

Research paper: https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/25/2937/2025/

[kylecazar]

I do have one experience with Singaporean lightning, pre the 2020 regulation! I was on a ship that was anchored overnight for fueling right outside of the port of Singapore, and saw an otherworldly scene. I was on the smoke-deck in a storm, late at night. There was lightning every 5 seconds, the port in the distance, horizontal rain, dozens of huge cargo ships around, and some gigantic flames coming from land that looked like Mordor (a refinery or plant of some sort?).

Not sure if the crazy lightning was because of sulfur, but I still remember it!

[whycome]

Smoke-deck?

[fuzzfactor]

I would imagine that a column of soot-containing air is more conductive if it contains oxides of sulfur than if it does not.

The same electrical potential may still be present in the clouds, but instead of being neutralized dramatically it could now be dissipating slowly rather than gone in a flash :)

More study would be good to have.

[scythe]

>The same electrical potential may still be present in the clouds

I wouldn't jump to this lemma so quickly. The paper mentions the density of aerosols. Sulfur oxides promote condensation by forming low-volatility compounds like H2SO3 and H2SO4. An increase in the number density of droplets could mean more triboelectric charge transfer between the droplets and the air. That would increase the amount of electric energy in the clouds.

This is also the mechanism by which sulfur has been proposed for geoengineering, but I think the variant that replaces sulfur with terpenes sounds safer.

[schiffern]

The proposed mechanism would cause more lightning, not less.

I expect it's related to how lightning is triggered, not changes in atmospheric charge due to conductivity.

[xattt]

A little tangential, but I wonder if the decrease in ball lightning sightings is related to a decrease in particulate matter in the atmosphere as a result of less open-flame burning (hearths and whatnot).

[hopelite]

> The same electrical potential may still be present in the clouds, but instead of being neutralized dramatically it could now be dissipating slowly rather than gone in a flash

That was my initial thought, like a “phantom power” drain, the process by which electrons knock each other is able to happen in a broad manner, not concentrated in the poles and suddenly discharging among a single path, i.e., lightning.

It seems similar to how static electricity builds up easier in dry environments because in humid ones the electrons can more easily equalize across water molecules.

[sMarsIntruder]

Not just lightning apparently. SO2 masked for decades the global warming, and here we are.

[ccgreg]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming

Sadly misunderstood by a bunch of people.

[sMarsIntruder]

Dear downvoter, please tell me what you didn’t like about my comment because I cannot make any sense of it.

[siliconc0w]

I wonder if this has implications for geo-engineering projects that want to inject sulfur into the atmosphere. More lightning seems like a problematic side effect.

[mrec]

AIUI those plans typically involve injecting e.g. sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere specifically, not the atmosphere as a whole. Lightning can sometimes occur that high, but it's definitely not the norm.

[Projectiboga]

Doesn't lightning help make ozone? And lightining does help make hydroxyl ions, which help convert airisol methane.

[eastbound]

Could also help make lightning rods more efficient. Make them spout sulfur.

Wait, that explains why volcanoes always have a cloud full of lightnings too, when they erupt.

[3eb7988a1663]

Aren't there some wild power generation ideas of harvesting lightning?

[teeray]

It feels like there’s something mythological about less brimstone attracting less ire from the gods

[brookst]

Perhaps they should put altars to Zeus on the ships.

[metalman]

Now that the US is eliminating satelite based monitering of emmisions there is no way to do a definitive study on S0² concentrations over shipping lanes, and the earlier tentative conclusions will have to be disregarded. The very far fetched conjecture that adding S0² emmisions into the stratosphere without actualy increasing C0² and water vapor related and overall heat gain, is maddness.

[rapjr9]

So could this be used in reverse to map SO2 emissions by looking at frequency of lightning strikes across the world? Lightning data is already available from satellites. Looking at various lightning maps the strongest correlation is with storms, but perhaps some statistical magic could extract other signals?

[chiefalchemist]

Lightning is a chemical reaction? Fascinating.

[daneel_w]

Not quite. The emissions act as an electrically conductive medium. In a roundabout way it's similar to how pure and deionized water is an insulator, but tap water is conductive because of various impurities.

[lazide]

Interestingly, chemistry is an electrical reaction (electron interactions). So it might be more accurate to say both are mediated through the same underlying force - electromagnetism.

[potato3732842]

Very interesting, but this article is kind of a mess and all over the place.

I would expect a shipping lane to have more or less than baseline amounts of lightening regardless of soot on the basis of it being generally more churned up and therefore having slightly different potential than the rest of the ground (which just happens to be liquid water in this case).

It's not clear to me if the study is isolating the variable they're measuring properly.

Surely there's a "control" shipping lane somewhere that was cleaner to begin with or never cleaned up.

Additionally, it's well known that having a bunch of crap (including water) suspended in the air to bridge the gaps makes it easier for electricity to arc so it's not clear if and/or to what extent this the change a result of sulfer emissions or particulate generally.

It's also well known that particulate facilitates condensation (the article talks about this).

[HocusLocus]

Yes, and sulfur isn't the only cloud nucleation trigger. Refineries of ship 'bunker fuel' used to seek contracts from disposal companies to burn their chemical waste at sea. And dirty fuel has lots of natural vanadium. Source: oil spill around my houseboat legal case in the 1980s, fuel company had to disclose breakdown of content.

[lesuorac]

> Surely there's a "control" shipping lane somewhere that was cleaner to begin with or never cleaned up.

Isn't the shipping lane the "treatment" group and everywhere else in the world the "control" group?

Like we administered x mg of sulfer to the patient and they saw y outcome while patients not receiving sufler saw z outcome. When we stopped administering sulfer all patients saw z outcome seems to be isolating sulfer as causing y.

[atoav]

> It's not clear to me if the study is isolating the variable they're measuring properly.

> Surely there's a "control" shipping lane somewhere that was cleaner to begin with or never cleaned up.

As mentioned in the first paragraph of the article they are using the Global Lightning Detection Network, which is well, global. Then you just need a map of SO2 concentration and compare shipping lanes against non-shipping lanes. You don't need an explicit control group if your data includes the whole planet, since you can just compare shipping lanes against similar areas with less/no shipping. Since both lightning and SO2 also varies over time you can also correlate this way with enough data.

[ccgreg]

Hopefully you read all of the links in the article -- the purpose of thecoversation is to present information to the general public, with references to research that the author has been involved with.