GEC II: 2:47 minutes
GEC Day 1 clip-2012-07-05 08;12;18
Jeff Forbes 21 minutes
1 GEC 6:19:50 Jeff Forbes
0-1:40 Mentoring goal of the project and why that’s
important
2-4:00 What excites you about this project?: It’s a
little bit out of the box; a lot have worked on this or a
long time w/ variety of results but not well established physical mechanics to explain;
Interdisplinary – we’ve had to gather a group of scientists from diff’t areas of atmosphere
and space research to work together: behavior of clouds, lightning, space physicists working
on interaction of solar wind w/… not only that we cross disciplinary boundaries in that we
have to work with electromagnetism, chemistry, and others that usually aren’t combined on
one project.
3:55/4:10 Are scientists on the project all modelers? Many aspects are related to
modeling but we have to look at data, physical relationships that explain the data, and
translate that into a mathematical model, and the models exist at different time and spatial
scales that have to be integrated into a global model, and uh, There’s a lot of modeling that
goes on but there’s basic physics we’re working on before we create the models.
5:17 How well do we understand the physical properties of the GEC? Are we at the
beginning stages? Yes, we’re at the beginning stages. That’s one of the reasons that we
need to create a global model because the pathways are so complex that we need the model
to serve as a context for us to analyze and interpret the data.
5:40 What datasets are you in need of?
It varies with scale. We’re looking now at NASA aircraft data that fly over thunderstorms and
clouds and their properties and how they correlate with currents that feed the electric
current on small scale, then we want to parameterize those globally. We use satellite
measurements of rainfall, cloud characteristics, and we try to fit it into one coordinated
picture of the mechanisms involved in GEC. In terms of what we need, better observations of
the properties of clouds from space, and ground based verification.
Aerosols/Small particles: small particles are important in GEC because they can influence
the conductivity; if you’re familiar with how a circuit works – if you have a voltage and a
resistance, the resistance will determine how much current will flow, so particles effect the
resistance in the atmosphere and how charge is distributed.
8:30 What are the key research questions you are trying to answer?
The main question is what are the electrical pathways within the Earth system. The main q to
be addressed is to establish and quantify the electrical pathways that exist within the earth
system: where the currents are flowing, how the electric fields are distributed throughout
the atmosphere because these things relate to measurements that have already been taken,
so these measurements of the electrical system over the last 90 years, or nearly a century,
but there are no very good established models that allow scientists to verify the
interpretation of those measurements and the physical pathways that lead to the
measurements. So, some of the interpretations that exist are highly speculative, some of
them have profound implications, but we need models to establish their credibility.
10:40 What are some of those profound implications? I hesitate even to refer to them,
but we’d be thrilled to find some electrical pathways that affect the climate of the earth.
That’s a goal far in the future but we do know that clouds are essential elements of the
climate system and the way that clouds are created and the way that they evolve are
somehow linked to the electrical properties of clouds, if we can show that that would be
really something.
11:55-13:45 What exists now; what will you build off of? Our goal is to build a global
model of GEC that accounts for the generation of currents by thunderstorms, interaction
between those current generators with the upper atmosphere and magnetosphere and the
ground’s conductivity so it’s a self consistent global model, but there are very fine details
within that model that need to be addressed and that includes how individual clouds such as
thunderclouds vs electrified clouds without lightning – we have to establish how each
contributes to GEC. Fine time and spatial scale. It all needs to be integrated but we need to
specify how the conductivity or resistivity varies spatially as well as those current sources,
and temporally. Right now we’re concentrating on seasonal variations, but in time we’ll
probably include variations within a solar cycle, establishing relationships with the Sun and
its activity because galactic cosmic rays are impacted by the sun’s activity, and they’re
essential to GEC as well because they create conductivity and maybe even effect how clouds
are formed.
14:25 to 15:50: After 5 years, what will determine if the research was a success?
At the end of our 5-year project, we should be able to explain some of the observations
accumulated over the last century. Our hope is, if the relationships we find is of any
importance, we hope to incorporate our model into a much larger model of the climate
system. (I haven’t really answered have I?)
I can say that our ultimate goal is a much better understanding of the global electrical system
than we now have. A way of measuring that will be that some of the relationships that we see
currently in some of the data that’s accumulated over the past century, we’ll be able to
replicate with our model. If our model is able to do this, then I think we’ll have to achieved
success.
16:00 – 18:30 If you had one answer to an unknown with the GEC, what answer would
you seek? If I could answer only one: how does the space environment influence the climate
and weather. (Off record, do we know what we are looking for? There are pretty established
relationships between the Solar activity and climate, but they can’t be explained based on our
current knowledge of the solar radiation output of the sun. So its often been speculated that
there are indirect ways that the Sun can influence climate. One of those ways is if the
behavior or formation or the distribution of clouds to the GEC, then that could feed in to
some effect on climate but it remains a highly speculative area of research and we hesitate to
even suggest…) We think that by pursuing an improved knowledge of the whole GE system,
discoveries will emerge that we might not have even had anticipated. That’s the way basic
research goes. It wouldn’t be called basic research if we already knew what the outcomes will
be.
18:33 – 21 Various parties involved:
Key players: Victor Pasko and his group at Penn State, well known expert on lightning and
thunderstorms (and TLE)
Wiebke Dierling: expert on clouds and working on relationship between clouds and how they
develop electrical current
Art Richmond and Jeff Thayer: experts on the ionosphere and the Sun
Jeff Forbes: BA and MS in electrical engineering; combining my PhD atmospheric science
with my earlier work, in some sense all of my education is being called upon… # # #
GEC Clip2012-7-5 7:08:34 – Victor Pasko 26
minutes
0-60 sec: What is your role? I’m from PSU and
Communications in Space Science Laboratory. In
that lab for the last 10 years we have been very
actively engaged in the development of
theoretical understanding of TLEs in earth’s
atmosphere so we work on a variety of subjects
related to lightning, lightning behavior, lightning
physics, so my expertise actually will contribute
to this project in terms of lightning physics, an
understanding of lightning behavior and
dynamics.
60 Fascinating research because for the first time we’ve assembled a team of this magnitude
that will be attacking questions on a global scale, so actually we’ll look at many different
subjects related to the global electrical system
1:23 What’s the biggest challenge in the research? In research related to lightning, we really
need to understand what are the contributions of lightning charges to GEC. GEC can be
defined as a gigantic electric capacitor w/ 2 electrodes: earth is one and second is distributed
represented by the ionosphere so this capacitor is charged – one plate, earth’s surface,
maintains a negative charge about 100,000 coulombs of negative charge; another plate
maintains a positive charge. There are many diff’t sources . Thunderstorms and lightning
represent one of these sources within this GE system. But there are still questions as to how
much lightning charges contribute. From my perspective, it’s also very interesting to know,
how much Transient Luminous Events contribute: sprites, elves, jets – also contribute to this
system.
2:40: What is a TLE? TLEs are relatively new phenomenon. It was documented only about
two decades ago. It was a discovery during a nighttime media observation of luminous
events above thunderstorm. We all know that lightning usually propagates from cloud to
ground and represents of course major danger for humans. Some lightning discharges
actually occur above thunderstorms at very high altitudes. Between 20km and lower
atmosphere where TLE reside and there’s diff’t types that have been discovered. Elves:
donut shaped TLE that expands very quickly at ionospheric altitudes and its also the most
frequent type of event and its also the most understood. It’s just produced from vertical
lightning current. If you look at vl current as a radiator as a vertical antennae, it doesn’t really
produce any radiation right above it; it produces radiation on its sides and it actually
expands at the speed of light and as it touches the ionosphere it produces optical luminosity.
So this is what we call “elve” It’s a fascinating very fast phenomena and Stanford U used a
series of very sensitive photometers about a decade ago to document this
expansion…dynamics.
Second type is sprites. Sprites have preferentially a red color and that’s why sometimes we
refer to them as red sprites. They’re produced by a thundercloud quasi-static field. In other
words when lightning occurs it imposes a field at the upper regions of the atmosphere. That
field acts on electrons, accelerates them, produces ionization and light, and this is essentially
what we see as a sprite phenomena. So sprites are preferentially red then they convert to a
blue deep color at lower altitudes, and its remarkable that CTR Wilson, a noble prizewinner,
actually predicted sprites many decades ago and now we can observe these phenomena and
quantify its related effects.
5:10 and finally there is a set of events closely related to sprites, very often we see sprites as
luminous channels of ionization which are preferentially vertical. Sometimes we see a
concave glow, which is preceding, this luminous channel which we refer to as sprite halos. So
you can think of sprites as effectively two types: sprite halos and sprite streamers, vertical
columns.
5:42: And finally there is a variety of jets that have been discovered, referred to as blue jets,
gigantic jets. GJ are especially interesting because they take the negative charge from
thunderclouds and transport it to the ionosphere. They also form a direct pass of electrical
contact between a thundercloud and the lower ionosphere, that’s why these events are of
great interest from the point of view of the global electric circuit.
6:15 who named these phenomena?
The name of sprites was introduced by Professor David Stenman (sp) of the Univ. of Alaska.
It was chosen not to resemble anything, to avoid any association with a physical mechanism,
some fleeting object, and sprites. Blue jets were proposed at about the same time by Gene
Ves?, a colleague of Dave’s at the Univ. of Alaska I believe it was in 1994 when a campaign
was funded by NASA using 2 airplanes. It was the first time triangulation was done using
sprites. Jets were also documented also during that time. So with the first color imagery that
was obtained, jets were blue; sprites were preferentially red so that’s why blue jets were
introduced. Elves were first discovered from space shuttle and ss videos, and its quite
remarkable that Prof. ? at Stanford predicted this phenomena, the bases of electro magnetic
series that I tried to tell you about, so it was prediction and then it was documentation.
7:50 And then gigantic jets were discovered in Puerto Rico at the ? Observatory in 2001 in a
Sprite observations campaign. In fact the name was introduced later and just because these
events are gigantic, they have this very energetic appearance so GJ was a nice name. It was
introduced I believe by Taiwanese colleagues, ? University.
8:21 There seems to be a lot of cloud studies of late. Are these related to GEC?
We distinguish between diff’t types of clouds in terms of the GEC. There is still discussion as
to what cloud produces the main contribution to GEC. Clouds are electrified, but not all
produce lightning. How much do they contribute to the GEC?
9:12 Why are sprites so rare and elves so common? In order to produce a sprite according to
CTR Wilson, you need to move a large quantity of electric charge from thundercloud to
ground to impose a significant electric field at high altitudes so it appears that in nature in
lightning phenology that we observe, these phenomena are infrequent. Right now we don’t
have a reliable estimate on how often they occur on a global scale. French colleagues
estimated that there are 37 sprites global per minute; some other estimates from our
Taiwanese colleagues from satellite (thermo sate) measurements indicate 1 or 2 sprites per
minute, so as you can see there are great differences and we need to get more quantitative
data about how often these events occur. And if I remember correctly, elves occur 30 per
minute. Any intensive intense lightning discharge that carries current, and you need
impulsive and strong current during a short period of time, not necessarily moving a
significant deal of charge required for sprites, you can produce these elves. I should mention
Many of these events remain a visual just because usually they observe elves sprites from
long distances and because of satellite observations distances maybe 1000s of km so its not
really easy to observe this low light phenomena from these kind of distances; were probably
looking at the tip of the iceberg. There could be many more events actually occurring that we
don’t see visually.
11:14 Can you comment on their length?
Sprites and elves are very transient phenomena. If you look at the night sky, the best is look
at thunderstorms several hundred km away from you. If you see a sprite you may not even
realize you have seen sprite so it lasts very very short fraction of a second, usually several
milliseconds, so this is 1 thousandth of a second. Gigantic jets last much long up to 1 second.
You can see propagation of these phenomena and you can actually see dynamics of these. In a
normal speed video you can actually see the propagation. So length is quite different among
transient luminous events.
12:40 What are the key questions the GEC research seeks to answer regarding lightning and
TLEs? There’s a lot of questions that need answered. At PSU were working on answers
regarding gigantic jets; how lightning discharge can escape from thundercloud and
propagate toward the lower ionosphere. And lightning itself of course exhibits a very strong
concentration of energy; the gas in the air reaches very high temperatures inside of the
lightning channel; just because of this concentration, lightning is very dangerous phenomena,
so there are still questions about why lightning when it propagates upward in earth’s
atmosphere why it changes from very hot concentrated in nature and changes into its more
distributed nature resembling sprite streamers effectively. So we work on understanding
this heating effect. There are many q remaining to the initiation of sprites. We don’t
understand very well why sprites are produced by very weak lightning discharges, not very
often but it happens. We’re developing models so with those models we hope to understand
better this. And of course in the context of the GEC modeling, we want to quantify how much
lightning contributes to the GEC in comparison to electrified thunderclouds and electrified
clouds. There’s existing controversy in the literature regarding how much lightning
contributes. In some cases scientists claim 40% of the total current issued so we want to
actual measure and quantify actual amounts.
15:28 What’s your hunch?
If you think about lightning and events related to lightning, right now we know that GJ can
move very large quantities of electrical charge from thundercloud to Ionosphere (paper
Duke) which quantified an amount of charge in excess of 100 coulombs, so if you think about
a global distribution of charge in GEC which is about 100,000 coulombs, it presents a
significant fraction, .1% in effect. The question about transit response to the system is not
really answered. In other words when these effects happen are effects actually measureable
on a global scale, this kind of charge transfer so these are the kinds of questions we want to
answer.
16:30 Can you explain the Schumann Resonance and why that’s important? SR is basically a
wave guide phenomenon so lightning discharge s a very broad band radiator, it launches
energy at many different frequencies in the ionosphere, wave guide. Certain wavelengths in
this frequency are comparable to the size of the earth, so a very low frequency band of
wavelength. These waves can be confined inside of wave-guide system and formed by
earth’s surface and the ionosphere. And this is what essentially forms the SR. So the first
shell is essentially 8 hertz so this is very low frequency and the beauty of these waves in fact
launched by lightning discharges is that they can propagate in this very thin shell between
earth’s surface and ionosphere. So if you think of the radius of the earth which is more than
6000 km and the height of the ionosphere, you are actually looking at very fine thin shell so
waves inside this shell in this frequency which form the SR can propagate with very little
intonation for long distances so it’s a very beautiful way you can use remote sensing of
lightning discharges from long distances without in situ measurements.
18:00 Continuous? (Cubers?) SR is continuous due to global lightning discharges that create
SR and there ringing when energy is released into it, but you can see diurnal variability…
SR is a wave-guide, related to Carnegie curve. CR is related to measurements of electrical
fields in GEC, electromagnetic. As we progress through continents through a day, you have at
9 UT very active over Asia, 14 UT then peaks in Africa, then So. America peaks around 20, 21
UT so we can see this very clean diurnal variation in lightning activity in electric field and in
GEC just responding to this intensification in thunderstorms and in lightning and you see this
very clear variation because of that.
20:22 In terms of modeling, how difficult is it due to scale and time variations?
This system has very many diff’t time scales; for sprites we have to go to microseconds and
smaller to model internal structure of sprites so of course when we talk about the GEC we
describe it on scales of thousands of kilometers so the way we approach this is we develop
different models for different scales. For Schumann Resonance or a model for radiation in a
wavelength from sprites for example, so we develop models for different scales effectively. In
time, we will collect various models representing various time and special scales into one
GEC model. Once we understand the individual elements, we’ll put them all together.
Researchers modelers?
Patient, you work with computer codes, and things don’t always go right. You have to be
persistent and understand to the very depths the subject that you’re studying.
Why students should be interested?
Practical aspects related to long range communication, heat balance in earth’s atmosphere,
and its impact on creation of clouds. It allows us to better understand our electrical earth.
Are we at the beginning of this research?
I would say that young scientists in this field can make some significant contributions. Just
need to be creative as usual.
25:00 Long-term variations?
In existing research is the GEC decaying or increasing, there’s no really clear answer. Local
pollution creates problems, changes in results of measurements. Pollution reduces local
conductivity because charged ions are attached to more heavy pollutants as a result
conductivity is reduced and electric field is going to increase however this doesn’t really
mean it is so on a large scale. It is just a local effect. Recent pubs: Simple growth of trees
over many years and the shielding effects of trees on electric fields may be an issue. Proxy
records on Electric field? Not sure. We do have actual measurements from last century
approximately. # # #
Sarah. 11:01 minutes
Tell me about soars? SOARS is (lots of takes here).
43 sec. SOARS is a program for undergraduates as
well as graduate students and it’s the Significant
Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and
sciences. I definitely wanted to do something over
the summer before my senior year and SOARS was
a great program that would give me hands-on
experience in research, and I didn’t have any prior
to this summer and I’m not exactly sure yet what I
want to do. So I’m so glad I’m here. It’s a great
opportunity.
1:24 So what are you doing here? Right now I’m working with Wiebke Dierling and Christina
Kaulb on a cloud electrification and Global Electric Circuit project where I am looking at
different cloud proprieties and ice microphysics as well as updraft strength of these different
storms and I’m seeing how these properties related to the Wilson Current that these storms
are producing.
2:00 What is a Wilson Current?
A Wilson current is part of the GEC . In the Earth’s atmospheric system there exists an
ionospheric potential of 250 kilovolts and this creates a (messes up). In the GEC there is an
upward pointing electric field that comes up off the top of clouds and goes into the upper
atmosphere and this is known as the Wilson Current. Then as an equalizing response to the
Wilson Current, there is a downward fair weather field that goes down towards the Earth’s
surface and this cycle is part of the GEC. I’m looking specifically at that Wilson Current and
seeing how it relates to different cloud properties. So if a storm has more ice or stronger
updrafts, diff’t characteristics like that I guess.
3:40 Tell me a little bit about the diff’t case studies you are working with.
I’m looking at four diff’t case studies, one of which is an oceanic multi cell case that occurred
on Sept. 18, 2001 just off the coast of Florida near the Keys, and like I said that was a multi
cell storm. I’m also looking at three single cell continental storms that occurred over the
Florida Peninsula. So I’m seeing different relationships not only between continental and
oceanic, but single cell vs multi cell storms as well.
4:15 What is the difference between single cell vs multi cell storms?
A single cell thunderstorm has a single updraft and single downdraft. It can be more isolated
but not necessarily. While a multi cell storm as a series of updrafts and downdrafts that are
all interrelated and linked, and its kind of on a larger scale. With my case studies thus far
we’ve found that a single cell storm is producing a Wilson Current but it is not as strong as
the multi cell’s because when you think about it, a multi cell storm has all of these different
updrafts – all these different generators of current working together as one creating this
Wilson Current. It’s stronger than in the single cell thunderstorms, which is consistent with
past experiments.
5:17, What excites you about this research?
I’m meteorology major so almost anything relating to the atmosphere I find fascinating to
start out with. This research in particular with the GEC – a lot of it isn’t well understood. One
of the reasons this research is so important, is just that. It’s not well understood. Not a lot of
people understand it yet. I enjoy this research mainly because, you know, not a lot of people
have discovered what is going on (let me rephrase). One of the reasons that I’m so interested
in research like this is because the GEC as a whole isn’t well understood. A lot of scientists
are collaborating as we speak looking at diff’t aspects of it, trying to understand it to see what
types of societal impacts there are. I’m very interested to see what those impacts are, just to
understand it (in a better way).
6:41 Why are so many different types of scientists involved?
There are a lot of diff’t people involved in research like this because GEC is very complex. It’s
not just looking at a thunderstorm; or not just looking at lightning. Your looking at the
atmosphere in a number of diff’t levels so weather, that typically occurs in the troposphere,
whereas other parts of the GEC are from the ionosphere up, so at the very top of the
atmosphere. Were looking at almost diff’t space weather phenomena as well. A lot of it isn’t
well understood, such as elves, sprites and blue jets. These are very recent discoveries. Of
course I’m very early in my education, but as a meteorologist I know that they don’t seem to
directly impact thunderstorms that impact people’s homes and communities, but who
knows, maybe it does. We’ll discover that in the near future hopefully. So there’s a lot of
expertise need with different portions of the atmosphere.
8:12 to 11:01 is more footage for SOARS (how she chooses her school and her major and
recommendations of others interested in meteorology just entering college. Her path.
Valparaiso.) What does she hope to do in the future? What would you say to students who’d
like to follow in your footsteps? (Ask questions)
###
GEC Day 2 Clip-2012-07-06 04;36;04 (art)
Art 11:39 4:23:45
6:37, What is your role?
My role on this project is modeling ionospheric
electric fields and currents, and helping to
develop a model of the GEC from the ground up
through the ionosphere, and connecting the
ionospheric component with the lower
atmospheric component.
7:18, What excites you the most about this
research?
I think it’s always exciting to get into a field of
research where there is many unknowns. We do
understand, or at least we think we understand the ionospheric electric fields and currents –
the basic elements of it although there is still many aspects that we do not know how to
model fully. Much less well known is the lower component of the GEC and I think in this
project I think we will almost inevitable discover new features that are going to teach things
about atmospheric electricity and possible connections to atmospheric processes.
8:12 Biggest challenges?
The biggest uncertainties in modeling the GEC are: understanding just what the sources are,
particularly the sources in electrified clouds and thunderclouds and how are charges
distributed in these clouds and also the variations in atmospheric electrical conductivity.
There are large variations in the conductivity and this effect the distribution of the electric
fields very strongly, especially how aerosols – meaning cloud droplets or dust in the
atmosphere – affect the conductivity.
10:42 Biggest challenges (again)
One of the big challenges to our project is understanding how to develop a computational
model, a numerical model to develop the numerical algorithms with the flexibility to handle
the types of scientific issues we are concerned with. This means having a model that can
handle the entire global atmosphere and ionosphere and represent the global features, but
also with the capability of going to relatively small-scale features. Given that the atmospheric
conductivity varies by many thousands or millions of times with space between the lower
and upper atmosphere, numerically this poses challenges.
9:04 What is the ionosphere? The upper atmosphere mainly above 100 km altitude is partly
ionized mainly by sunlight – ultraviolet and x-rays from the Sun – of course most strongly on
the sunlight side of the Earth. There is also ionization caused by energetic particles that come
in from outer space from the magnetosphere especially in the aurora zones. Once atoms have
been ionized, meaning electrons have been knocked off of them, the electrons are free and
they effect radio wave propagation quite strongly, especially radio wave propagation
through the ionosphere between space craft and the earth. Eventually the electrons and ions
due recombine through various chemical processes.
Art 13:14 7/6 4:36
One of the processes in the ionosphere that effects the electric fields and the currents is the
ionospheric dynamo and this is the process where winds in the upper atmosphere which are
much stronger than the lower atmosphere, they move this electrically conducting
ionospheric gas through Earth’s magnetic field and this is a process that creates an electric
magnetic force and drives electric currents and produces electric fields, and by modeling the
ionospheric dynamo we are able to get information about patterns of winds in the upper
atmosphere.
1:45 Geomagnetic storms, magnetospheric dynamo
Another important source of electric fields and currents in the ionosphere is due the
connection with the magnetosphere that extends far out into space, and the Earth’s magnetic
field extends far out into space and is influenced with its interaction with the solar wind
which is continually flowing out from the sun. The solar wind drives motion in the Earth’s
magnetosphere; these motions get transmitted into the atmosphere’s ionosphere basically
being mapped along the geomagnetic so they end up most strongly at high latitudes in the
aurora zones. During different types of solar disturbances, we can get very strong currents
driven into the ionosphere and this produces magnetic storms. One of the concerns during
storms, which we will investigate in this project, is that when there are very rapid changes in
the ionospheric currents we get electric currents induced in the Earth and these currents in
the Earth and they can get into electrical transmission systems and disrupt power
transmissions. Part of our project is to understand better some of the factors that effect the
generation of very strong electrical currents at high latitudes. Field dynamo
5:15
Cosmic Rays: In the lower part of the atmosphere which for a ionospheric physicist which
means the stratosphere and lower atmosphere there is still very weak electrical conductivity
that’s caused by ionization from very high energy cosmic rays that penetrates into the lower
atmosphere, and as we get closer to the ground, radon that is emitted from small amounts
does produce a very weak ionization of the air so that the atmosphere is electrically
conducting all the way from the surface of the Earth to the ionosphere even though the
conductivity is very weak. The currents flowing in the lower atmosphere are much smaller
than in the ionosphere but it is these currents that are connecting the lower atmosphere
with the ionosphere.
6:23 How strong of a conductor is air?
Air is a very weak conductor, much weaker than the Earth. This is one reason we can run
electrical power lines through the air without losing power from them. However the power
lines are grounded into the Earth taking advantage of the fact that even the Earth, not only
ocean water which is relatively highly conducting but even the solid Earth, conducts
electricity much better than air so this is a way to ground various types of electrical circuits.
And it’s precisely these grounded circuits and long transmission lines that allow the
occasional geomagnetically induced currents during magnetic storms to get into the power
system.
7:36 explain the Circuit up and down
The main source, we think, is the fact that the ionosphere is a few hundred thousand volts
charged up with respect to the Earth is very weak currents that flow out of the tops of
electrified clouds, thunderclouds and other electrified clouds, And over these clouds, current
generally flows upward to the ionosphere. Since the ionosphere is much more highly
conducting than the lower atmosphere, the currents can more easily spread out horizontally
and in other regions of the Earth where there are no thunderclouds the fact that the
ionosphere is charged up a few hundred thousand volts above the surface of the Earth means
that a weak current is flowing back through this weakly conducting atmosphere from the
ionosphere to the Earth. We have a system, GEC, where in localized regions current is flowing
up to the ionosphere and then in very broad regions of the Earth we have a very weak
current flowing back to the surface of the Earth.
9:25 Sun Cycle’s influence on GEC? (Art thinks Jeff Thayer may be better to address)
The sun influences the circuit in a few ways. One is these energetic cosmic rays, galactic rays,
that ionize the lower atmosphere, are modulated by the solar wind and the magnetic field
that is carried out by the Sun during years of high Sun spot activity. This magnetic field that is
carried out with the Sun helps to shield cosmic rays from reaching Earth’s atmosphere so we
have less ionization going on. This is an effect that occurs with an 11-year solar cycle. In
addition, we can get other types of effects. The cosmic rays can be modulated on shorter time
scales when bursts of the magnetic field from the sun go out and engulf the earth and
provide further shielding, but the sun not only shields the Earth from galactic cosmic rays,
the sun itself produces very energetic particles especially during solar flares and CMEs, and
these very energetic protons can come out and ionize the upper atmosphere of the Earth.
And sometimes they can be sufficiently energetic to get down into the stratosphere. These
are called solar energetic proton events. (background change). So the Sun plays a complex
role both in modulating the galactic cosmic rays that come into Earth’s atmosphere and in
being a source of very energetic particles that at certain times very sporadically that can
ionize the atmosphere especially in the Polar Regions.
11:50 What would make the research a success?
As a scientist my interest in this research is just to better understand more about what is the
source of the atmospheric GEC and how does it vary. If we learn more about that, as a
scientist I will be quite satisfied. Its possible that we will find some practical applications to
certain parts of this research; we do know that the ionized electric fields are important for
different types of space weather applications and the geomagnetically induced currents can
be another type of space weather of importance. It’s also possible that we’re going to learn
how certain types of measurements of the atmospheric electric circuit can be used to get
more information – possibly to links to climate variations; we don’t know if there are any
significant links but its something we plan to investigate. 13:10 ####
Brian Tinsley, UT Houston (I think)
21:30 minutes
I’m mainly interested in this grant because its
been known for a long time, since the time of
Benjamin Franklin, that thunderstorms charge
up the upper atmosphere and the currents
come down even in fair weather. Its been
suspected now for 30 or more years that these
currents actually affect clouds and affect
storms. I’ve been interested in them for a long
time in terms of trying to understand the
physics to what’s going on; how these very
tiny amounts of energy coming down in these
electric currents can be amplified by a factor of more than a million to affect the dynamics of
storms, winter storms especially, we’re seeing good data for changes in the currents affecting
the storms.
1:10 research challenges/opportunities:
I definitely think there are opportunities for improved forecasting. The effects are fairly small
on the day to day time scale maybe tweak the forecasts slightly on the day to day timescale in
terms of when the winter storms were coming, but the cumulative effects – the sun goes
through a cycle of activity every 11 years that brings electric galactic rays into the earth and
that affects the conductivity of the atmosphere, or if you’d like the amount of current that
flows down in the atmosphere and this has an effect on the storms so it seems we might be
able to improve the long-term forecasts of winter weather and there’s some very good data
as to when we had some high cosmic fluxes and a minimum of solar activity in the late 1600s
to 1715, there was about a 65-year period where very few sun spots, there was high
numbers of cosmic rays, and the weather patterns in Europe changed dramatically in winter.
They were very cold winters; the Tiames froze over; the channels in Holland were so solid
that they built shops on them. I’m interested in trying to explain the physics of what went on
and we think it is probably due to what went on in the global circuit. Other people have
different theories. They think it might be due to solar UV affecting the stratosphere. We’ll
have to see how the research goes and which effect is stronger.
3:00 Why is this new to science to a degree?
There’s been a tremendous amount of interest for the last 2 centuries in fact, every sense the
astronomer William Herschel correlated winter weather in Britain with the Sun spot cycle.
There’s been over 2000 scientific papers written, a dozen books, and 20 or 30 conferences,
many of which I’ve attended. People are interested in finding the mechanisms by which the
solar changes impacted weather and climate. For the last 25 years I’ve been focusing on
possible explanations of atmospheric electricity in the global circuit. However, when
progress is slow and you have somewhat noisy data you have to dig out the results from the
noisy data and when you don’t have a good explanation for it people can dismiss it as chance
occurrence, in the same way they dismissed the idea of continental drift with Alfred Wegner
and a strong physical mechanism they could relate it to. I guess the interest waxes and
wanes. It’s only in the last 10 to 20 years that interest has picked up again from a lull that
occurred in the middle 70s. Walter Orr Roberts who founded NCAR and John Wilcox who
founded the Wilcox Solar Observatory in Stanford were both very interested in this. And in
fact, Captain Mary was interested in solar effects on weather and climate, too.
Because there wasn’t much progress in understanding the physics of it, it took interest away
and some very skeptical papers came out by authorities who ought not to have been
dismissing ideas because the evidence wasn’t all strong. The absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence of a mechanism. There was a period of several decades that this was
looked on as not a very respectable field of science.
Why is the GEC so important to understand? Well, so we can make better models, not only of
weather on the week to week time scale but if weather and climate on the 11-year time scale
– also there are periods when you get climate, long periods of droughts or excessive rain and
so on. Part of that is due to changes in Earth’s orbit and also seems to be due to changes in
solar activity that affects the global electric circuit and has periodicities of 90 years and 400
years and so on. So we hope to be able to explain some of the past climate changes plus
what’s going to happen in the future. Now all of this has to be coupled with the increase in
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that has been modeled as causing global change. We’d like
to be able to help improve the models of global change by better understanding what
atmospheric electricity does to the clouds and to the general circulation.
7:17 Tell me a little bit about your work: 25 years ago I was actually a program director at
the national science foundation, and I got interested in this field and worked with some
people, and I talked to a program director at NSF, several program directors. Program
Directors , better people to talk to if you are working on the frontiers, are the people who
have established themselves in the science, plus they are interested in the unknowns. The
general scientists are interested in telling you what they know and not to have anybody come
up and upset their particular field. So for 25 years, beginning at NSF, with some difficulty, I’ve
been getting funds ever since to study the electrify in the atmosphere and how it relates to
changes in clouds and in how changes in clouds relate to changes in the intensity of storms
and how that relates to the circulation of the atmosphere.
8:31 Its relevance then to GEC… GEC is the fundamental part of the connection between solar
activity, well the connection between solar activity that I’m investigating and changes in
weather and climate. So we have to understand the global electric circuit better and I think
this work being done here at NCAR making better models of it all will help to get a more
accurate model that can be used to make better predictions of the effect of the Sun on
changing currents that flow in the global electric circuit and therefore weather and climate.
9:12 Difficulty of building these models:
Its very difficult to make models of the Global Electric Circuit because the generating process
in clouds is not terribly understood. We can understand the electrical current that’s coming
out of thunderstorms and is flowing upwards in the u atmosphere but there’s still a lot of
unknowns about what’s going on in generating electricity flowing out of clouds at low
latitudes. We can understand how the currents flow up to the ionosphere and come down all
over the globe … there’s quite a few unknowns about what’s going on in the stratosphere.
Especially after volcanic eruptions there are a lot of aerosols produced by the volcano in the
stratosphere; they affect the flow of current there so that’s a big uncertainty and we need
much better data on that . There’s particles, precipitation, there’s high energy particles
coming out of the radiation belt that cause ionization in the stratosphere and that affects the
current that flows in the global circuit as well and there’s a lot of unknowns about that. I
think it’s going to take quite a few years to get a good model out of all of this but I think it’s an
endeavor that’s worthwhile.
Global Electric Circuit Graphic Explained: 12:40
This is a diagram of this global electric circuit that’s going on here. The main generators (of
electricity) at low altitudes are thunderstorms over south America here, Africa, and around
there Indonesia. And they produce currents at about 1,000 amperes that flow upwards and
into the ionosphere that is a good conductor and spread around the globe. Then they come
down in clear air which is what Benjamin Franklin was finding by flying kites and getting
sparks off the wires from the kites. The currents flow downward but the currents also flow
downward from clouds and as they flow downward they put electric charge in the clouds and
affect the development of the clouds. Changes in the Sun also affect the global circuit quite a
bit in important ways because there’s high energy particles coming from the sun and there
are cosmic rays coming in from the galaxy that have to fight there way in toward the Earth
against the solar wind and the sun spots come and go on the sun the solar wind grows
stronger or weaker which causes the cosmic ray flux which ionize the atmosphere and make
it conduct electricity. So the Sun, and also electric fields that come in with the solar wind and
are found particularly up in this region around the magnetic poles, in arctic and Antarctic.
We’ve analyzed a lot of data from the arctic and Antarctic; we see these effects from the solar
wind very clearly on the electric fields that we can measure at the surface here, and we also
see changes on surface pressure and in the mid latitudes here we see changes in the
dynamics of winter storms, all related very closely to the changes in the electrical currents
flowing down in the global circuit.
16:15
My major interest is, and its been since I was a student, an undergraduate at the University of
Canterbury in New Zealand back in the 1950s and 60s ; and the question then that people
were asking was how is it that the sun can affect weather and climate? I did a lot of research
on the upper atmosphere but it wasn’t until about 25 years ago that I got seriously involved
in looking at atmospheric electricity as the link between the solar activity and all the changes
it makes in Earth’s atmosphere and how that would affect the electrical currents. And then I
was interested in how you can amplify a very tiny amount of currents that’s involved flow in
these global electric currents. They get amplified by more than a million when they impact
the dynamics of storms. It’s a huge natural amplifier. It’s a bit like putting a match to a dry
landscape and starting a forest fire. You don’t need much to trigger a change if there’s energy
there that will be released and that’s what’s really what’s happening with storms so that’s
what fascinates me; there’s all these natural processes going on and I think I can make a
useful contribution to understanding them.
How electricity is produced (using graph) in the GEC:
GEC Day 4
Jeff Thayer 10:12, 13:19
What is your role on the grant?
…to investigate the effects the geomagnetic
activity has on the EC as well as the conductivity of
the atmosphere and what its role is in following
charges that lead to this GEC.
I’m a professor in the aerospace engineering
science department at the University of Colorado
at Boulder. My field of research is in aerospace
environments. It’s a class of the aerospace
discipline that allows us to look at things like the
interaction of spacecraft and aircraft in an environment.
1:50 Why is this grant so multi-disciplined?
The topic is so broad that there’s no way to avoid the fact that one single person will not be
able to accommodate the breadth required for this study, so we need to pull together a team
of specialists, people with expertise in various areas that together will allow us to tackle this
big problem. I think that is part of the reason why the problem has been around for awhile,
you can almost say a century, and even beyond that when people were interested in the
electricity in the atmosphere. It requires a multidisciplinary team with diff’t skill sets to
attempt to tackle a problem of this magnitude.
2:40 What are some of the elements needed in this research?
There are people who are looking at cloud electrification, for instance. There are a lot of
microphysical processes that occur within a cloud that relate to electrical charge distribution,
and those electrical charge distributions lead to currents, electric fields and EF and C tend to
be none localized. Once you create them, they have a broad range of extensive impact and so
there are occurrences where lightning effects can happen in one hemisphere and the reaction
of that can occur in the other hemisphere. There’s none local processes as well as local
processes. You have the people working on the microphysics then you have people working
on maybe the larger scale features of the circuit. Because we have a magnetic field of earth
which in a sense can be considered part of the electromagnetism of the planet they can
communicate electrical processes long distances. There are members of the team that are
involved in the numerical modeling of the 3 dimensional aspects as well as a the fourth
dimension of time, trying to model this processes and give some physical basis by which they
occur. Then you try to use that physical information to better understand how the electrical
processes within Earth’s atmosphere related to other processes: physical, chemical, and
those types of things.
The electrical pathway is another mechanism by which the atmosphere behaves but its not
very well understood as opposed to chemical pathways or things like the ozone hole which is
chemically well known that the ozone hole is affected by chemistry and the reproduction of
the consequences of such is through solar ultraviolet radiation getting to the surface lets say.
Electrical processes and pathways are really poorly known. That’s why we’re in this new
area of research lets say for this topic.
What qualities are important for those serving on the team?
5:45 Skills of numerical modeling on the sphere and developing these models to provide a
physical realization of the process without the encumbrances of numerical instability and
problems that can come up just through the numerical method. There’s quite a bit of data,
but there’s a large breadth of data with various components of that data needing to be
connected. People need to understand the datasets and the kind of data that is available.
The instrumentation that’s being used to make the data and what the data products are
actually telling you. You never have the perfect measurement so you always have to lean to
interpretation. People who have done data analysis, data processing, and those with a
background in solar and Earth’s atmosphere, and electrodynamics and that kind of covers
the breadth of the team.
7:30 What is a dynamo? This comes up quite often in the discussion of the GEC. It’s the
process of converting mechanical energy to electrical energy. People experience it everyday.
There are electrical generators; maybe steam is the element that drives the turbine that can
then lead to the mechanical conversion to electrical energy. That’s basically a dynamo. In the
atmosphere and in space and space plasmas, the general dynamo description for lets say the
magnetosphere – what’s called the magneto hydrodynamic dynamo – is one where
mechanical energy is introduced by the motion of plasma that crosses a magnetic field line.
That creates a separation of charge, which then creates a current. An induced electric field
occurs and you can close that circuit – you can create the electrical energy to drive something
else. At the same time, there’s a slowing down of the plasma so you can see that the
mechanical energy of the plasma is slowed down and that energy conservation process
would require that it goes someplace else and it goes into electrical energy.
So in the magnetosphere it happens with plasma blowing across the terrestrial (planet’s)
field lines.
8:55 It also happens in Earth’s ionosphere. That’s where plasma is forced by the neutral gas;
the neutral gas of our atmosphere is driven by pressure gradients, coriolis forces – they then
collide with the plasma and force the plasma across field lines and create a dynamo there as
well. They are therefore, sources of electrical energy. When we talk about “dynamo”, we
talk about them as a source of electrical energy that then can be tapped.
9:45 Connections to geomagnetic storms and solar cycles?
My area of investigation is related to geomagnetic storms and geomagnetic storms are
results of energy impulses coming from the Sun. We live in the solar atmosphere; changes in
the solar atmosphere will be felt by the Earth system. The Earth is a big magnetic dipole so
there’s an electrical interaction that occurs between the sun’s solar wind and the Earth’s
geomagnetic field. Through that interaction process, energy is extracted and transferred into
the sensible atmosphere of the neutral gas and the ionosphere and the upper atmosphere.
These impulses are what are called geomagnetic storms. We register those storms in terms
of a measurement: a deflection in Earth’s magnetic field that an influence associated with the
Sun’s atmosphere. The geomagnetic storm alters the electrical characteristics of the upper
atmosphere. That atmosphere serves as the upper portion of the GEC. You end up feeling
the response of the upper atmosphere through that circuit to the lower atmosphere. But its
not well known at all how that process takes place and how that’s communicated. We know
that geomagnetic storms influence the GEC. We don’t know how those storm effects are
manifested into other aspects of the Earth system such as the tropospheric winter storm
tracks or things like that, that people have correlated with geomagnetic activity but not
provided the physical pathways by which they occur. The grant is to look at the
effects/physical properties of the GEC. We are interested in seeing once completing the
model then investigating connections to other tropospheric effects but right now were
looking at GEC and the geomagnetic effects on that circuit. I would say for processes related
to the circuit, BIG TIME geomagnetic activity is important. We’re just not going to quite get
there for the whole atmosphere. Its just a huge task. We have to keep it somewhat confined.
12:40 Ions in the atmosphere?
The formation of charged particles in our atmosphere has several sources. People may be
most familiar with the ionosphere because that’s what its name embodies. Ions exist. Free
ions exist. Electrons and ions exist in the atmosphere. They end up – they’re formed by
extreme ultraviolet radiation (pause due to heat)… The formation of the ionosphere: As ions
and electrons make up components of the atmosphere they form what’s called plasma. But
how does that come about? The atmosphere is largely a neutral so you need some energy to
change that. The way the ionosphere is formed due to the extreme ultraviolet radiation from
the sun. That provides the energy by which you can separate electrons from the atom. They
become free electrons and the atom now becomes positively charged which is an ion, a
positive ion. That makes up the charged part of the ionosphere largely from the extreme UV
radiation. As you get deeper into the atmosphere, that radiation gets absorbed by the upper
atmosphere and doesn’t reach the surface. So… you need more energetic particles to further
ionize the atmosphere, as you get closer to the surface. That’s partly brought on by galactic
cosmic rays that have very high energies that can get through the atmosphere and in that
path collide with neutral particles and create ionization that way. There’s also energetic
particles from the magnetosphere that come in and they also create collisions and create ions
in the lower atmosphere.
There’s also something called bromstrong ionization, also called breaking radiation and
that’s where the particles come in and collide – they slow down, and in that deceleration
process they release a photon. Those photons are then again in the ultraviolet range and
even in higher energies. That’s secondary ionization that can create ions. And finally at the
surface, you have radioactive decay, which people would know as radon that comes up and
emanates from the surface and create ions. The distribution from the surface all the way to
the edge of space is dynamic/variable (same thing) its this distribution that is so challenge
because there’s chemistry and physical pathways and there’s external sources and forces
that make it very difficult for us to account for it all but we know that those ions constitute
the conductivity of the atmosphere. That’s how currents/charge moves, and so if you have
variable conductivity that effects the charge movement and therefore the distribution over
the globe change and it’s a big 3D understanding of those processes to get it right for the GEC.
4:20 Data
With all of this modeling efforts and everything, what is needed are measurements to verify
and validate the models capability. And so data, observations, satellite and ground based data
are key. And so different data sets exist on different portions of the circuit elements. For
instance all the people are looking at the data provided by the TRMM satellite on lightning
discharges and there’s a large database of them. That will be one of the datasets that will be
heavily probed and worked with to try to understand the lightning strikes, the likely amount
of discharges that occur. For me what’s important is I need to know what interplanetary
space is doing. So when I’m looking at the solar effects that lead to geomagnetic storms that
then lead to an influence on the global electric circuit , I need to know what upstream solar
conditions are. There’s a NASA mission called ACE that’s out in the southern laberation
point that measures those parameters of the key properties of the solar atmosphere and
we’ll be using that quite a bit because these pulses and impulse disturbances coming from
the sun need to be understood and quantified because there not all the same. They have
different interactions with our own atmosphere and we need to quantify that. So for me that
will be a heavily used database. We’ll have to also work with others who are collecting data
on the surface of the earth with regard to vertical electric fields and conductivities to further
validate the models. Really without the observations we really won’t have much to say as to
the truth about the models.
7:00 The big challenges?
In terms of the grand challenge of this project, it has been recognized for decades that the
GEC plays a role in the Sun-Earth system. As people have focused heavily on the chemical
pathways, the physical pathways, but the electrical pathways have not been well understood
or significantly investigated to the point that we could understand how the electrical
pathways are impacting our Sun-Earth system, our climate. There are many correlations but
the physical mechanisms are not well understood. A big picture on this project is to start to
move us forward in the same manner we’ve moved forward in chemistry and physics,
physical interactions, to work with the electrical pathways, and then how these electrical
pathways couple to these chemical pathways and to these physical pathways. That’s a grand
scheme and something that’s necessary in order for us to fully understand the Sun-Earth
system and we think that this element needs attention and we’re going to give it that for the
next five years and I’m sure we’ll make great progress in doing so. I think we’ll bring to light
more of these electrical processes and start to get people to incorporate those into their
larger scale models and to have them work on both the ion chemistry as well as the neutral
chemistry that seems to dominate presently.
Note: looking to built a transient model and then a steady-state model
###
Roy 6:33
My name is Raymond Roble and I’m a senior scientist
emeritus at HAO at the Nat’l Center for Atmospheric
Research, The University Corp. for Atmospheric
Research sponsored by the National Science
Foundation. My interest, I’m an aeronomer and I
study the upper atmos, and also the interaction of the
sun with the upper atmosphere producing things like
the aurora, drag on satellites, interactions with the
ionosphere, and so forth. I was in my office in July of
1977 working on a problem of the upper atmosphere
when all of a sudden a thunderstorm went by my
window. And it cracked and lightning flashed, and thunder rumbled and so forth. And I said
to myself “ I don’t know much about atmospheric electricity and lightning” so I went directly
to the library and started reading. I read all about thunderstorms and electricity and I was
namely interested in the global electric circuit because there are a lot of electric currents
flowing in the upper atmosphere and I was curious how they would couple with the electric
currents associated with lightning and the Global Circuit. During that time I interested a
colleague of mine, Prof. Paul Hayes of the University of Michigan. He was between satellite
projects and had some time so I was able to get his attention and have him focus in on the
problem because he’s an excellent mathematician. These were the old days, 1977. We did
most of our correspondence by telephone and regular mail. No Internet at that time. It took a
little while before the telephone calls and mailing were finished. He did much of the
mathematics involved with it. I found myself with a new Cray Computer. NCAR just
purchased the new Cray computer. It went from the CD 7600 to the Cray 1 Computer. While
others had trouble transferring over to that machine, I built this model of global atmospheric
electricity on this machine. That basically was the history. We corresponded for a couple of
years and in 1979 we published 2 papers. … On the global electric circuit.
3:20 So what is the GEC? We know that there are updrafts and downdrafts in thunderstorms
and they produce charge separation because cosmic rays ionize the atmosphere and the ions
are redistributed by the currents and by the updrafts and downdrafts. In general, the positive
charge goes to the top of the storm and negative charge moves to the bottom of the storm, so
there’s a large potential difference between the two. And when the potential difference
provides something like 5000 volts per meter then there’s lightning discharge. It can be
either cloud to cloud or cloud to ground. When the cloud to ground lightning occurs, there’s
a current that goes from the cloud to the upper atmosphere, in a tower straight up to about
100 km altitude, the base of the ionosphere, then the currents get redistributed globally all
over the global because the conductivity of the ionosphere is very high. The conductivity of
the Earth, is also very high. And the atmosphere in between is not a good conductor, So we
have two highly conducting plates separated by an insulating layer being the atmosphere, so
this is a capacitor. The earth, and the ionosphere and the GEC is a capacitor. So the currents
go up and charge the ionosphere with the potential difference between the ground and the
ionosphere, maybe 300,000 volts. The current gets redistributed globally, Some of the
currents flow along the magnetic field lines one hemisphere to the other. But in general, this
upper layer is at a constant potential, not quite. Yes the thunderstorm charging gives it a
constant potential but there are other currents in the upper atmosphere: the dynamo driven
by tides forcing ionization across magnetic field lines in the 100 km region produce around
a 10,000 volt potential difference and make about 100,000 amperes. The interaction of the
Earth’s solar wind with the magnetosphere at high aurora latitudes in both the north and
south result in currents flowing in about the million amps flowing around in there. The
current that flows between the ionosphere and the ground, is more on the order of (stopped
to check).
So there’s a 1000 amperes of current flowing between the ionosphere and the ground and
there’s a potential difference of about 300,000 volts. The current flows from the
thunderstorm into the fair weather regions and then it drifts down from the ionsophere as a
steady current, a very weak current only about 10-12 amperes, but it’s enough with the
decreasing conductivity so that it maintains a potential difference between your toe and your
head of about 100 volts. So each person on earth here has about 100 volt potential between
their toe and their head. That’s maintained by 2-3000 global thunderstorms acting
simultaneously at the globe at any given time. That is basically the global circuit and we
developed a computer model – first an analytic model based on very complex mathematics
and then we developed a numerical model. And part of this new project here, is to continue
where we left off from 1991. At that time, I left the field because I got involved in some
satellite programs and so I am not up-to-date with the literature from 1991 beyond but other
members of this group can fill in the details of the research that has gone on since then.
1:57: What will be the team’s greatest challenges?
It is very complicated. There are clouds, cosmic rays, there’s dust, there’s volcanoes that
produce lightning; there are clouds that are electrified, fog, dust storms, mountains, all sorts
of physical processes that have to be kind of subroutines that have to be inserted in to the
solver that solves for the whole electric current system. What we would like to know is how
this global circuit changes in regard to number of thunderstorms; is there a global change
aspect to it; will there be more thunderstorms in the future charging the ionosphere higher.
How do these dynamo currents in the upper atmosphere and this aurora currents, which are
a million amperes compared to the amperes that are flowing in the lower atmosphere; how
do they all interact. So this is part of the very complex model. I had started to develop a lot of
the subroutines but the problem got way to big for me…
3:37 timescales and special scales?
The way I envision it, it will be very similar to the community Climate Model. A model that
very many people are working on with various components of the climate system and there
are maybe hundreds or thousands of people working, and there are various models of that,
so the challenges will be to use that framework, perhaps couple the electrical model with the
climate model because the climate model will calculate winds which redistribute the ions;
they’ll calculate dust and many of the physical properties that are needed for the global
circuit. I see this as a subroutine system component of the climate model. It will stand alone
because of the time constants involved are so fast near the surface, maybe on the order of 20
minutes, and in the high upper atmosphere a fraction of a second. So … you could do a steady
state, a quasi steady state. It won’t interact with the climate model, at least initially but that
uses the input to the climate model to solve for the equations.
Stan: 15:50
Youngest son of … of eight, but now just me and
brother left. I’m from a small village called
“Chakezek.?” I’m just as well at home hunting then
in the lab. I’ve always been interest in the
sciences.
How interested in science?
When I was in 8th grade I took my GED and took
my 9th grade at Univ. of Alaska at Fairbanks;
picked on by all the geeks so I joined the military.
Eventually decide to finish what I started; went to
study space weather….
When I left Jr. High and went to college, I left and
joined the military, and did firefighting. In 2009 I
came back to the college to study in physics and mathematics. Since 2009 every summer I’ve
done an internship. Going to school at UAF. I’ve always done an internship. My first
internship was at the international arctic research center up by the geophysical Institute at
UAF. After that, summer of 2010, my professor was invited done here by SOARS. We came
done here for a week and toured around; they told me to put in an application and apply so I
did. Told me to apply again, so I did. I’ve had 2 science mentors, Art Richmond and Astrid
Maute, They’re into modeling high altitude atmospheric interaction physics, so that is what I
do.
What is a model? Oh boy, a scientific model is man’s best representation of nature by
copying nature. You go out and measure something, get all the nice little points, do the math
and come up with the equation, put that into the computer, and it’s the best representation of
nature. Then what you do later on, is you run that computer at its extremes then you might
have an idea of what it would be like with something goes wild and crazy and a big storm. It
allows us to look at the worse situations without having to sit through the middle of a storm.
Tell me about the ionosphere? The ionosphere is more plasma physics, which includes the
Sun, the ionosphere, magnetosphere, and even the atmosphere if you’re not considering it as
plasma anymore but a fluid, but my real interest is in the electromagnetic nature of plasma
physics. This is applicable to where I live in the world so this is what I do and hopefully what
I can do in grad school for the next two years.
Role on GEC grant: …I’m basically a small part. This summer my research is on the
magnetopshere ionosphere interaction and modeling. It has to do with what’s called pointy
flux as to how - when the Sun’s magnetic field hits earth’s magnetic field, it transfers energy
into the lower atmosphere and into the ionosphere and that’s called joule heating. And that
heating is transferred, in what’s called pointy flux which comes down in a magnetic field like
current ; its that in the model I am researching, represents. It’s a brand new model and it’s
part of the TIGCM Global circulation model package. It’s still developmental, tweaking all the
programming and everything . I’m basically checking to see how applicable it is to satellite
data it’s derived from and to do that, I’m comparing it to another model with similar
characteristics but it’s also derived from the same data as the model I’m checking. It’s those
2 models I’m comparing to see how realistic and how well they match.
11:50 The Data I’m working on comes from the Dynamic Explorer 2 satellite, which was from
August 1981 to March 1983. It’s a satellite that zipped around the earth a couple thousand
times. It measures electrical fields as well ionic drift (?) I believe. And they can derive Once
you know certain key variables and equations you can solve for a whole lot of other variables
and equations because physics is consistent. There’s a rule that says these 2 items are related
in this way, no matter where you go, those 2 items are related in that way. And its those
equations that says all you need is a couple measurements from something like 400 km up,
and then from that you can derive a whole bunch of other things based on the physics, and
that’s how the models are designed and built and made. So we can duplicate nature and
hopefully create extreme situations that aid in greater understanding without actually
standing in it., an extreme situation.
I’m ____ Native American. I can hear my language; I can also speak parts of it.. There are
others who are researching back because they don’t want our language to die which it is, and
there’s all kinds of names for all the stars, auroras, what it does, how it does it, different times
of the seasons, and how they all relate together. That will be one of my science projects when
I’m walking around with a cane, not too long from now. They’ve got words for everything.
And we don’t know it because its never been recorded, never been researched. Some of my
friends are doing that now, and they now what I’m doing here in terms of learning physics
and how its applicable, its applications. My friends are researching all that, recording the
language from the elders till alive as to what all the stars mean, how they all interact and so
forth, and they do have their own astronomical clock. And so later on I might apply all this
physics to it; who knows.
Christina (Tina) – 12:00
I’m Christina Kalb and I’m a assoc. scientist at NCAR.
And I’m working on the role of thunderstorms in the
GEC.
I’ve always been interested in weather and I get asked
the question all the time, that that’s the only answer
have. (chatter)
BA Ohio State and MA at CSU. Home is Cinncinati,
Ohio. We are looking at the role of thunderstorms in
the GEC, so every thunderstorm, weather it’s
producing lightning or not, generally is electrified and
has a current (shadow problem).
So we’re looking at the role of thunderstorms and
electrified clouds in the GEC so a cloud doesn’t
actually have to be producing lightning to be
electrified and there’s what’s called a Wilson Current
that generally runs from the top of a cloud to the ionosphere and helps feed the GEC. In the
typical thunderstorm set up it’s a source of charge. In the reverse set up, with the opposite
polarity, it’s generally a sink. We are hoping to find some parameters of thunderstorms, for
instance we’re looking at the speed of the updraft and how much ice is in there. And we’re
hoping we can relate to how strong or weak the current is.
3:35 What is a Wilson Current? A Wilson Current is just a current coming from the top of a
thunderstorm cloud. We often only think about the current that come in lightning to the
surface but there’s actually one that runs from the top of the top of a cloud into the
ionosphere.
4:10 Electrified clouds:
A lot of clouds have a little bit of charge inside of them just because by turning the water
vapor into a liquid it changes how electricity flows through the atmosphere. But a
thunderstorm can be electrified and it may be only producing in cloud lightning, or it may not
be producing lightning at all or it may be producing cloud to ground and in cloud lightning
and in kind of depends on how strong that charge gets. The stronger the thunderstorm
generally, the more particles you have and the more charge you have, but that isn’t always
the case.
5:00 What’s the most challenging part of what you are doing?
The most challenging part is probably going to be looking for trends and separating out
different types of thunderstorms. So not all the cases we have, the airplane that flew over the
storms didn’t always hit directly over where we expect the peak current, so that influences
our results and we’re going to have to apply a correction for that. I would say that’s probably
what’s most difficult.
5:32: Where is your data coming from? Our data is coming from a number of diff’t field
projects . We have surface based radars that are over the United States, some that were near
a lake down near Australia, there was a field project in Brazil, and then we have an airplane
that flew over the top of the thunderstorms. It measured current and it also had a Doppler
radar on that as well. The plane is called the ER2. It flies at a 20 km altitude
7:20: Advice to others interested in a career in meteorology:
I got started in meteorology because it is something that always interested me, so when it
came times to choose a college I said that that is something I’d like to learn more about, but I
didn’t really know what I wanted to do and I was actually in a summer project in 2003 down
in Oklahoma where I was able to do research under 3 different mentors, so I got to try it out,
and I found that I really liked research, more so than forecasting because I think forecasting
is kind of guess work sometimes. Once I had that experience, I knew where I wanted to go
and that was into research. Then, it was just figuring out what degree I wanted, where I
wanted to go from there. I think the best thing is to get experience in what you’re interested
in doing. I a lot of times they’ll let you go down to the Nat’l Weather Service and shadow
people if you think forecasting is something you’re interested in. Or there’s a number of
summer programs where you can try your hand at research.
Challenges in terms of modeling? Not doing the modeling.
Cycles in terms of thunderstorms globally?
More local… nothing here.