We may be onto what has thrown meteorology a curve. Direct measurements of atmospheric potential with respect to Earth ground have demonstrated a gradient of some +100 volts per meter of elevation. Therefore, It has been perfectly natural for the shop talk to refer to an atmosphere of positive charge more or less. In fact, a distinguished professor has advanced an explanation that the surface of the earth holds a large negative charge and the that atmosphere holds an equal but opposite charge.
However, an old run-of-the-mill electronics technician has come along to reveal that those voltage measurements show nothing about the atmospheric bias voltage. The Fair Weather Current claimed to be of some two pico-amps of upward electron flow, more or less, through an atmosphere of some 50 giga-ohms of resistance per cubic meter. If I have this straight, such an electron flow through such a resistance produces a minus-to-positive voltage drop in the direction of electron travel of 100 volts. When rockets ascend to measure atmospheric voltage, they are simply measuring this IR drop across the resistance in the path of such rising electrons.
Kirchoff has mentioned that the algebraic sum of voltage around an electric circuit is zero. Hence, that Earth ground reference potential we access when measuring atmospheric potential is equivalent to millions and millions of negative volts.
It is hoped that this insight clarifies the mysteries of atmospheric lightning: A negatively biased atmosphere presents the means of storing energy, not by on the spot dislodging of electrons from water molecules, but by mere compression of negative ions into closer proximity. Not only do such processes find a readily prepared infrastructure for energy storage, but they lend themselves to successive reiterations toward development of intense voltages. If you compress a volume of anything, it remains right under your nose. Were charge separation the actual means, then the pulling-apart of anything is a spreading out of its volume. That makes it harder and harder to reiterate a process because you have to go all ways at once to recollect everything just so that you can spread it all out some more! As an analogy to the elasticity of rubber, our world squeezes the rubber ball instead of stretching the rubber band!
With our biased atmosphere, heat absorbed with the evaporation of water can be returned as electrical energy through an understandable process. This simpler reality negates the requirement of gathering more and more data for generation after generation. When it takes a lifetime just to count all of the data, no time is left to draw any conclusions from it.
