The individual charges transferred when supercooled water droplets or ice spheres collided with an artificial hailstone in the presence of an electric field have been measured in order to check the theoretical predictions of the inductive theory of thunderstorm electrification. the inductive theory equation was found to be obeyed for 100 μm supercooled water droplets, but droplet transit time measurements suggested that separation only occurred following equatorial collisions with the smooth hailstone. This greatly limits the maximum charge that the hailstone can carry, and so, if rougher natural hailstones behave in a similar manner, this process is not thought to be significant in thunderstorm electrification. The charge transfer measured when 100 μm diameter ice spheres collided at 8ms −1 with a hailstone was affected by the presence of radial fields, but the change was less than that predicted by the inductive theory. the charge transfer was independent of temperature between −5°C and −25°C although the conductivity of ice varies greatly over this range. the effect of the field was to broaden the histograms of charge transfer rather than shift them as a whole to greater or lesser values and the charge transfer was not symmetrical under the influence of positive and negative fields of the order of 100 kV m −1 . These facts make the field dependent charging results difficult to explain purely in terms of the inductive effect.
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W. Gaskell (1981) studied this question.