![Lightning_hits_tree[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/lightning_hits_tree1.jpg?quality=83)
From the Institute of Physics: High-speed solar winds increase lightning strikes on Earth
Scientists have discovered new evidence to suggest that lightning on Earth is triggered not only by cosmic rays from space, but also by energetic particles from the Sun.
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Publishing their study today, 15 May 2014, in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters, researchers from Reading’s Department of Meteorology found a substantial and significant increase in lightning rates across Europe for up to 40 days after the arrival of high-speed solar winds, which can travel at more than a million miles per hour, into the Earth’s atmosphere.
A summary of the findings can be found in the associated Video Abstract:
Although the exact mechanism that causes these changes remains unknown, the researchers propose that the electrical properties of the air are somehow altered as the incoming charged particles from the solar wind collide with the atmosphere.
The results could prove useful for weather forecasters, since these solar wind streams rotate with the Sun, sweeping past the Earth at regular intervals, accelerating particles into Earth’s atmosphere. As these streams can be tracked by spacecraft, this offers the potential for predicting the severity of hazardous weather events many weeks in advance.
Lead author of the study, Dr Chris Scott, said: “Our main result is that we have found evidence that high-speed solar wind streams can increase lightning rates. This may be an actual increase in lightning or an increase in the magnitude of lightning, lifting it above the detection threshold of measurement instruments.
“Cosmic rays, tiny particles from across the Universe accelerated to close to the speed of light by exploding stars, have been thought to play a part in thundery weather down on Earth, but our work provides new evidence that similar, if lower energy, particles created by our own Sun also affect lightning.
“As the Sun rotates every 27 days these high-speed streams of particles wash past our planet with predictable regularity. Such information could prove useful when producing long-range weather forecasts.”
Professor Giles Harrison, head of Reading’s Department of Meteorology and co-author of the ERL article, said: “In increasing our understanding of weather on Earth we are learning more about its important links with space weather. Bringing the topics of Earth Weather and Space Weather ever closer requires more collaborations between atmospheric and space scientists, in which the University of Reading is already leading the way.”
To arrive at their results, the researchers analysed data on the strikes of lightning over the UK between 2000 and 2005, which was obtained from the UK Met Office’s lightning detection system. They restricted their data to any event that occurred within a radius of 500 km from central England.
The record of lightning strikes was compared with data from Nasa’s Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft, which lies between the Sun and the Earth and measures the characteristics of solar winds.
After the arrival of a solar wind at the Earth, the researchers showed there was an average of 422 lightning strikes across the UK in the following 40 days, compared to an average of 321 lightning strikes in the 40 days prior the arrival of the solar wind. The rate of lightning strikes peaked between 12 and 18 days after the arrival of the solar wind.
The solar wind consists of a constant stream of energetic particles—mainly electrons and protons—that are propelled from the Sun’s atmosphere at around a million miles per hour. The streams of particles can vary in density, temperature and speed and sweep past Earth every 27 days or so, in line with the time it takes the Sun to make one complete rotation relative to the Earth.
The Earth’s magnetic field provides a sturdy defence against the solar wind, deflecting the energetic particles around the planet; however, if a fast solar stream catches up with a slow solar stream, it generates an enhancement in both the material and the associated magnetic field.
In these instances, the energetic particles can have sufficient energies to penetrate down into the cloud-forming regions of the Earth’s atmosphere and subsequently affect the weather that we experience.
“We propose that these particles, while not having sufficient energies to reach the ground and be detected there, nevertheless electrify the atmosphere as they collide with it, altering the electrical properties of the air and thus influencing the rate or intensity at which lightning occurs,” said Dr Scott.
The increase in the rate of lightning after the arrival of solar winds was corroborated by a significant increase in the days in which thunder was heard, which were recorded at UK Met Office stations around the UK.
From Thursday 15 May, this paper can be downloaded from http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/9/5/055004/article
One part of the news about this new information said it could be used to save lives. Figures of tens of thousands of people being hit by lightning (no numbers on actual deaths) were quoted. Having the information about an increase in possible lightning strikes days before could mean that public health bodies can ensure that everyone stays inside. The fact that a cheaper and more immediate way of finding out exists seems to have skipped the scientists who want to find a justifiation for their grant. You want that mechanism? It’s called a thunderstorm and you can tell its arrived by the dark clouds.
vukcevic says:
May 15, 2014 at 4:49 am
Thank you for the link. No science, just “sciency”. No theory proposed, no attempt of deeper insight, just a simple statistics. Something that can be published in high Impact Factor peer-reviewed journals. Useless… However, puts a small weight on the anti-AGW side of the balance as it demonstrates unknown complexity of the system.
Invoking cosmic rays helps explain why we get lightning when the voltages in the atmosphere are not high enough for breakdown. There was an article in Physics Today several years ago addressing this. The idea is that the cosmic rays ionize air molecules, helping the lightning along.
http://nlpc.stanford.edu/nleht/Science/about/gurevich05phystoday.pdf
Solar forcing climate link?
Question: Does the solar wind causing lightning
then cause storms,
cause changes in cloud cover,
resulting in changes in insolation?
That could provide a solar amplification mechanism to climate.
meanwhile, for the “weather is never climate” files, May is usually the month here in East Texas where we start to see temperatures in the 90’s fairly often. This morning, the low was 47 degrees, which blew away the old all-time record low for May 15 here, which was 54 degrees. Now it’s a beautiful, sunny day; in fact, it feels like I’m in the Colorado Rockies. but Texas ain’t ever felt like this, this late in May, before.
It’s funny the things we learn as time goes by. I can’t remember the number of times I hear ‘in a surprising result’, ‘scientists surprised’, ‘unexpected’, ‘contradicts’ etc…. There seems to be a lot more we need to know about the climate, and I don’t just mean co2 and global warming.
At this rate they may find a connection between atmospheric temps and reconnecting field lines.
Unless there is a heatwave dontcha know. 😉
“found a substantial and significant increase in lightning rates across Europe for up to 40 days after the arrival of high-speed solar winds,
Isn’t 40 days prominent in the Bible? Perhaps there is a correlation.
FWIW, Florida does not see an increase in thunderstorm activity in the winter months. Perhaps there is no solar wind at that time.
First the government must allow science to slip the traces of politics, then the pieces for a robust theory of climate are out there, and CO2 will be a bit player at most.
The entire earth is enveloped in a voltage gradient of about 100 Volts per meter from the ground to the bottom of the ionosphere. That makes the entire planet a roughly spherical capacitor carrying about 300,000 Volts. All of that charge comes from, and is maintained by, the solar wind. Positive particles in the solar wind are stopped by the ionosphere while negative particles (small, fast electrons) follow the earth’s magnetic field down to the magnetic poles creating auroras on the way.
Sometimes convection cells of wet air can ‘short circuit’ this capacitor locally and momentarily in ‘superbolts’ visible from low earth orbit.
In addition to what Tadchem says, Serway and Jewett, “Principals of Physics” third edition has two sections that discuss the Earth as a capacitor. The bottom plate is the Earth and the top is the atmosphere at about 5 km.(chapter 20.11) There is a fair weather electric field and a much higher field that is present in thunderstorms.(chapter 19.12). I don’t know if anyone measures this field. It would be interesting to compare it to the rotational energy in tornados and hurricanes.
If the solar particles and cloud nucleation theory is true, is there a potential delayed link from increased cloud formation that builds up to bigger storms that produce more lightning? That could explain the 40 days number without having to posit a 40 day buildup of charge before increased release.
Seems plausible but more likely to be a flea on the tail of a dog.
tadchem says:
May 15, 2014 at 7:55 am
“The entire earth is enveloped in a voltage gradient of about 100 Volts per meter from the ground to the bottom of the ionosphere. That makes the entire planet a roughly spherical capacitor carrying about 300,000 Volts. All of that charge comes from, and is maintained by, the solar wind. ”
… and by tropical thunderstorms. Anyone interested in this subject, and it is a big one, should read Tinsley’s 2004 paper which deals with the global electric circuit, clouds as capacitors, ion-mediated nucleation and electroscavenging.
Atmospheric ionization and clouds as links between solar activity and climate
Here’s the link again:
http://www.agu.org/books/gm/v141/141GM22/141GM22.pdf
Re: 40 days delay
Protons from solar flairs encounter Van Allen belts and some are captured by the Earth’s magnetic field and will spiral along the ‘lines’ of the field. As they approach the magnetic poles, because of the magnetic mirror effect, protons bounce back and forth between the two magnetic poles.
Once a particle has lost some of its energy it will end up in the atmosphere.
It is far fetched, but since there are two or three belts (one more extra recently discovered and intermittent) it may be possible but not likely that cascading down from the outer to the inner belt, some days may past, but 40 days is stretching it a bit.
One even more outrages alternative:
Flairs energetic particles reach earth in about 2 days at 1AU, Jupiter is at ~10 AU., but distance from Earth every 400 days varies between 9 and 11 AU.
Particles hitting head on the Jupiter magnetosphere will bounce strait back towards sun and the Earth, reaching the Earth sometimes between 2x2x9 and 2x2x11 days, i.e. 36 and 44 days, which gives average of 40 days.
Nothing at Reading solar department happens without Mike Lockwood’s approval, one of the above may offer ‘out of jail card’, but not likely.
Leif says: “Makes the ‘result’ rather dubious. A prompt response would have been more plausible if there is a direct relationship.”
This just goes to show that even as you see potential evidence for capacitor-like behavior for the atmosphere and an instance of a heliospheric electrical connection that is not apparently caused by gravity, that since this is not what you wanted to see, your interest in the construction of accurate models based upon this interpretation will probably never respond to any observation which supports it.
A person need only learn about a drift current to see how unprovable this worldview is that wherever we see electricity in space, it must be a 2nd-order effect of other more fundamental phenomena (like expansions, explosions, gravity, etc). When you measure a drift current, the charged particles are all exhibiting random motions. Determining that there is actually a net movement of these particles is incredibly difficult, even if you are there in that location measuring it. The lesson of the drift current should have been that electricity in space can be very difficult to observe. It naturally follows that we will NEVER accidentally discover that all of the universe’s E&M is fundamentally connected. And for the same reason, neither can anybody EVER prove that it’s NOT all connected. The only way to add some clarity to the question is for everybody to get behind efforts to just create the models, to see if they can be made to be more predictive than the current models — as science prescribes.
This is why science exists — to test hypotheses. Where we see so much focus these days upon invisible and exotic phenomena in our investigations of cosmic phenomena, and so little interest in pursuing fundamental physics explanations for the enigmas, even those who don’t care much for the Electric Universe worldview should exhibit a great amount of concern — for science means nothing if those who wield the power to actually write papers and study Nature simply choose to not apply it. That’s the imposition of a worldview upon the data and the public, and has nothing to do with science as a methodology for identifying truth. This is how we hijack the prestige of science, while disavowing ourselves of the underlying mechanisms which inspire that prestige.
We see long cosmic filaments at all scales of observation: the interplanetary, interstellar, intergalactic and even super-galactic. We see magnetic fields all over the place. When we look closely at some of these filaments, we see kinks and on occasion twisting and even filaments within the filaments — plainly suggesting that the magnetic fields are dynamic and accompanied by electric currents. MOND generates almost perfect galactic rotation curves — which, by itself, is suggestive that gravity is the side effect. The values we measure for G have for quite some time now deviated beyond the error bars. We frequently see stars form along filaments.
Nobody can stop Leif from imagining that it’s all disconnected, despite observations like this one, but neither should that stop people from recognizing that this belief lacks scientific basis — at least until we actually use science to ask the question.
Golly gee ! why the hell would a high energy IONIZING PARTICLE cause a lowering of the breakdown potential required to render the atmosphere conductive.
EVERYBODY knows that this phenomenon ONLY OCCURS when you capture that ionizing particle in a closed cylinder, like a GEIGER COUNTER or a lower Voltage PROPORTIONAL gas detector.
Well it certainly couldn’t happen BEFORE the ionizing particle gets here; the atmosphere doesn’t predict its arrival.
And it certainly wouldn’t happen, after the particle has finally hit the ground, without hitting anything vital, on the way.
So as Dr. Leif says; it wouldn’t be any delayed event.
But I already knew about this 60 years ago; that’s two full climate cycles; so it is pretty old news, I would say.
When I was at the U of A, we used to wait for a nice thunderstorm, so we could go down to the wharf at the harbor, and fly an old radiosonde balloon full of Hydrogen on a tether, and carrying a student’s gizmo to measure the electric fields under those clouds.
Luckily, we never got ourselves blown off the dock, along with our cylinder of Hydrogen.
(Helium had not yet been discovered, back then.)
Electric weather driven by the electric sun are claims of the electric universe theory, proven by this study.
http://www.star0bserver.info/home
That’s an interesting link. I should mention something that I’ve been seeing a lot of lately …
I frequently bump into astrophysicists online on this topic of the Electric Universe, and they like to complain about the EU suggestion that astrophysicists don’t understand something about plasmas. They appear to all agree with one another at the suggestion that this single statement discredits the EU.
But, a person need not go any further than this post by Tim Thompson at http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=4782369&postcount=8 …
“As far as I am concerned, any paper published on this topic in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science should be ignored.” …
“IEEE Transactions is where the plasma cosmology people publish … Well, the answer is that nobody has ever read them, at least nobody involved seriously in the galaxy business” …
“My last position at JPL before retiring was with the Evolution of Galaxies Group. Based on my experience with those astronomers & astrophysicists and their collaborators, I am quite certain that most of them do not even know that the IEEE journal exists at all”
—
I urge people to think carefully about what is going on here: The Electric Universe proposes that we can take our laboratory observations of plasmas and apply those principles to our astronomical observations. IEEE’s Transactions on Plasma Science is well-known for their plasma publications. And this is important, because there are certain phenomena which relate to electrical plasmas which will not be published in the Astrophysical Journal, or other journals which propose that cosmic plasmas need not be electrodynamic phenomena.
Chief among these electrical plasma phenomena is Marklund convection (pictured briefly in the link you sent). So, when you hear a professional scientist suggest that the EU has no physical model, it might help to realize that the topic of Marklund convection tends to only get published in IEEE’s Transactions on Plasma Science — and it would be near-impossible to build an electrodynamic cosmology without it. It is the electrical version of gravitational accretion.
This is why the critics of the EU tend to discredit themselves: They want to be able to critique this worldview, while simultaneously refusing to read IEEE. People should be calling them out on this, for those two decisions combined formulate a contradiction.
While I’m generally a fan of investigations of the electromagnetic aspect of the climate, this study seems dubious at best. This press release says:
Actually, this is bait and switch. They did NOT measure times before and after “the arrival of a solar wind”. Instead, they defined “trigger events”, times when the
magnetic field in the z direction (perpendicular to the plane of the planetary orbits)velocity in the y direction changed by more than a certain amount.Here’s where the trouble starts. Per the study they used six years of data, 2000-2005, and they identified 532 “trigger events” during that period. Six years times 365.25 days per year divided by 532 trigger events gives one trigger event every four days!!!
They are doing a stacked analysis by aligning 532 copies the same data, with each copy shifted on average by about four days, and showing what happens for two months on either side of the overall average of each of the “trigger events”???
Words can’t begin to express the folly of this procedure … by the time you’ve extended your stack analysis out sixty days in both directions, it includes about thirty “trigger events” in each and every 120-day long shifted copy of the data.
w.
First off – You are currently converting speed units from miles per hour to kilometers per second
1000000 mph = 447.04 kms-1
Anyone watching the Solar Page at WUWT knows the solar wind will vary between 250 to over 800 KM/s and its ‘arrival’ is constant, just varying speed and density. i.e. PE=1/2 * M * V^2.
In these instances, the energetic particles can have sufficient energies to penetrate down into the cloud-forming regions of the Earth’s atmosphere and subsequently affect the weather that we experience.
Also on the Solar Page – The OVATION Prime Real-Time (OPRT) tool is a real-time forecast and nowcast model of auroral power. They list power range from 5GW to 150GW. So something that has enough energy to luminous miles of N2, cannot create a few thunderstorms??? By the way the GW’s mostly affect a thin slice in the polar regions.
Jeff says:
“Invoking cosmic rays helps explain why we get lightning when the voltages in the atmosphere are not high enough for breakdown.”
Well it is a bit obvious, isn’t it? It is not a ’cause’ it is akin to the way a CCD camera works. Something pre-charged is loosed by a kick up in voltage.
I am also not surprised by the delay with peaks at a couple weeks. The particles are not light waves, people! It says they are travelling at various speeds and fast packages of particles can overtake slower ones. The spiral of particles leaving the sun is well known and has been mapped for decades by the Voyagers.
So the delay between an increased emissions/blast at 1,000,000 miles an hour and its arrival at Planet Earth is….? That’s right, 93 hours. So if it is slower and more massive, it will take longer to get here and maybe has an even stronger effect on the charged portions of the atmosphere. I can’t see why anyone is surprised by this.
The incoming blast does not have to ’cause lightning’ any more than a finger on a trigger ’causes’ a bullet to leave a rifle at 1000 ft per second. But it does, doesn’t it. 🙂
Graphic representing the heliospheric sheet is a bit down the page at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/29/nasa-cosmic-rays-up-19-since-last-peak-new-record-high/