Use of the Global Electrical Circuit as a Diagnostic for Climate Change

The conductive Earth and the conductive ionosphere form boundaries for the insulating atmosphere in a structure known as the global electrical circuit. The sources for the global circuit are thunderstorms and electrified shower clouds worldwide. The DC global circuit involves continual charging of the conductive Earth to a potential of the order of -250 kilovolts with respect to the ionosphere and space. The AC global circuit (aka Schumann resonances) involves electromagnetic quasi-standing waves in the Earth-ionosphere waveguide continually maintained by lightning. The global circuit provides a natural and inexpensive framework for diagnosing global change. In this talk the responsiveness of the global circuit to temperature on a variety of time scales will be demonstrated. Efforts to invert multi-station ELF measurements of the Schumann resonance background signals for global lightning activity will be discussed.

További információ: Ortvay Kollokvium – 2014 ősz