Seasonal variations of atmospheric electricity measured at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station

Details Seasonal variations of atmospheric electricity measured at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station Seasonal variations of atmospheric electricity measured at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station

Sep 2004

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004jgra..10909308r&link_type=abstract

Journal of Geophysical Research, Volume 109, Issue A9, CiteID A09308

Physics

1

Ionosphere: Ionosphere/Atmosphere Interactions (0335), Ionosphere: Plasma Convection, Meteorology And Atmospheric Dynamics: Atmospheric Electricity, Global Change: Atmosphere (0315, 0325)

Scientific paper

Recent studies have shown that the general understanding of the Earth's global circuit is not entirely complete. Electric current originates from thunderstorm cloud tops and travels to the ionosphere, where it then leaks back down to the Earth's surface. Superimposed on this current is the dynamo generated from the interaction of the solar wind with Earth's magnetosphere. This paper investigates seasonal variations of the vertical electric field and current density as measured at the South Pole between 1991 and 1993. After initial data reduction, a model approach was used to decouple the magnetospheric and atmospheric components of the measurements. This approach calculated and subtracted the polar cap ionospheric potential from the measured data to obtain a signal of global tropospheric origin, in principle. The diurnal variations of the resulting data were averaged as a function of UT. These averages were calculated for the data as a whole and for the date sorted and binned by season and by magnetic activity level. The seasonally binned average results are consistent with recent papers indicating that the electric field measurement show global convective electrical activity to be a minimum during the Northern Hemisphere winter, in contradiction to the original 1929 Carnegie data. Because the electric field was a maximum during the Northern Hemisphere summer season, the midlatitude regions must contribute more strongly than the tropics to global atmospheric electricity. This analysis supports the link of electrical activity to global temperature. The magnetic activity binned results suggest that the polar cap potential model used underestimates the cross polar cap potential when there is a high Kp index.

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