Cloud Chamber an old apparatus with Climate-connections

Cloud Chamber tricks became a big deal during the scientific exploration of radioactivity, and atom-smashers. A clear chamber (glass jar) that is filled with super-saturated gas (can be just water-vapor; alcohol and others work better) displays a miniature condensation-trail when a subatomic particle passes through it. (The ‘tricks’ lie in creating the super-saturated condition.) A magnetic field causes charged particles to follow variously curved or spiraling paths; knowing the strength of the magnet, assorted facts about the particle can be determined, from the shape & length of its condensation-trail path.

Simple forms of the device are readily buildable. More sophisticated, worthwhile enhancements are available to meaningfully upgrade low-end versions, while remaining practical. Dry-ice for example, permits a cold-end that is mechanically simple, very cold, clean, tidy and water-free … and the stuff is made commercially. Build-articles and projects were once a low-intensity mass-craze in the DIY, amateur recreational-science field.

For studying radiation, you don’t want a cloud to ‘actually’ form in the chamber, because then you can’t see the condensation-trail. The chamber needs to stay clear, for trails.

Thus you can tell that before it was found that these things can be used to investigate – amazing and Much More Glamorous – nuclear physics, they were used to study, um, clouds. In a bottle.

You don’t now often run into anything about clouds, in relation to the cloud chamber, and there’s something to think about there.

Clouds & water vapor in the atmosphere contribute something like 60% of the overall Greenhouse Effect. Carbon Dioxide weighs in with maybe 6%. When you run into a statement that CO2 contributes ‘up to’ some pretty-high share, that’s over the Sahara Desert on an especially-dry day, or over the South Pole staring at the edge of the Expanding Universe.

Unfortunately for Climate Science, both clouds and insensible H2O vapor are notoriously uncooperative elements of the natural atmosphere. ‘Difficult to Model’ is realistically a euphemism for ‘we can’t’. You’ll know we’ve made our first baby-steps on this problem, when reliable weather-forecasts go out 10 days.

So taking the Cloud Chamber back to its roots as a device for studying clouds is something to consider.

Chambers for studying sub-atomic particles went big, and bigger.  A possible good angle is to go little – on a microscope slide with cover-slip, and watch under the microscope.

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