Why storms

The Short Answer:. All thunderstorms need the same ingredients: moisture, unstable air and lift. Moisture usually comes from oceans. Unstable air forms when warm, moist air is near the ground and cold, dry air is above. Lift comes from differences in air density. It pushes unstable air upward, creating a tall thunderstorm cloud. He began his work in ion therapy inadvertently: He needed a placebo for another experiment. Problematically, most people can see light, so subjects would know they were getting the placebo, potentially skewing the results.

Terman discussed this problem with Larry Chait and Charmane Eastman of the University of Chicago, who had used a powered-down ionizer as a placebo in a similar experiment. At the time, most people had heard—thanks to The Ion Effect —that negative ions helped our psychological states. Chait and Eastman reasoned that if they disconnected an ionizer, but made it look like it was on, people would believe they were receiving a true treatment.

Instead, he kept a negative ionizer on at an extremely low dosage, so low that its trickle counted as placebo. But the results shocked him. When patients had minute, high-dosage sessions for about three weeks, depressive symptoms decreased by more than 50 percent. Terman reported that result in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. The jury is still out on how the biochemistry of this mood-lifting might work.

The serotonin hypothesis remains a possibility, although better and brain-based testing is needed to rule it out or in. Another idea, Terman has written, is that negative ions land on the skin and neutralize positive charges that have built up there, which would decrease depressive symptoms if positive ions are, in fact, bad for the brain. Breathing in the ions could also activate the vomeronasal organ, a piece of nose anatomy thought to detect pheromones, and somehow send a positive message to the brain.

On the lookout for biological mechanisms that might explain the effect of air ions, Terman came across a study in which doctors dosed the lungs of ICU patients, who had just had surgery, with negative air ions. The same could happen in the veins of people with seasonal affective disorder SAD , an environment-induced depression.

If they do, researchers can step forward, figuring out how negative ions oxygenate the blood and why that makes people feel better. Catherine Harmer of the University of Oxford has also recently worked on double-blind, rigorous research—in which neither the scientist nor the subject knows which treatment patients are receiving—into how ions affect the mind. She set out to see if ion treatment produced some of the same psychological changes as prescriptions like Zoloft or Abilify.

In a experiment, Harmer gathered people with SAD and gave them a battery of standard emotional-processing tests, like recognizing positive and negative facial expressions and recalling negative and positive personality characteristics. The depressed were biased toward recognizing and remembering the negative, but healthy people in her experiment did not have this same bias.

When Harmer gave the patients a high-density negative ion treatment and then repeated the tests, they showed the kinds of emotional-processing improvement—like increased ability to recognize and recall those happy faces and words—as people who take medication.

In most measures, the healthy control group did, too. Both Terman and Harmer caution against overgeneralizing their findings to the stormy world outside the lab. Still, the scientists are willing to speculate a little. Looking to the world outside the lab, Terman also points to the work of a colleague, Phillip Mead of the University of Idaho.

Conceivably, if you showered every day for 30 minutes after waking up, there would be the same kind of antidepressant action I measured in our clinical trials.

W hen I woke up after the storm, I was still buzzed, though the world was once again still. Maybe, like a shower or a waterfall-centric campground, the big meteorological event changed the air ion concentration enough that the weather literally got under my skin, changing my brain or blood or both. Like lying in a field on a new-moon night, the storm had made me feel like I was part of the universe—an insignificant, crushable part, but a part nonetheless.

When I opened my front door, it led to a new world, one with a lot fewer upright trees and utility poles. None of them had fallen on my car or house. The storm, I learned, had been a hurricane-force phenomenon, with winds that screamed up to miles per hour.

Meteorologists christened it the North American Super-Derecho. My town had no electricity—and so no water, which came from wells—for two weeks. A supercell, the largest of all thunderstorms, is likely to spawn tornadoes.

Credit: UCAR. Picture a thunderstorm - heavy raindrops beat the roof, lightning flashes through the windows, thunder booms, the dog whines from his hiding spot under your bed. Now picture two thousand thunderstorms.

Right now, at this very moment, there are about two thousand thunderstorms going on around the world. Even though thunderstorms are common, they are still dramatic events with intense rain, hail, wind, lightning, thunder, and even tornadoes.

Thunderstorms form when warm, moist air rises into cold air.