Lightning-Made Waves in Earth's Atmosphere Leak Into Space

[n2doc]

ScienceDaily (Nov. 29, 2011) — At any given moment about 2,000 thunderstorms roll over Earth, producing some 50 flashes of lightning every second. Each lightning burst creates electromagnetic waves that begin to circle around Earth captured between Earth's surface and a boundary about 60 miles up. Some of the waves -- if they have just the right wavelength -- combine, increasing in strength, to create a repeating atmospheric heartbeat known as Schumann resonance. This resonance provides a useful tool to analyze Earth's weather, its electric environment, and to even help determine what types of atoms and molecules exist in Earth's atmosphere, but until now they have only ever been observed from below.

Now, NASA's Vector Electric Field Instrument (VEFI) aboard the U.S. Air Force's Communications/Navigation Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS) satellite has detected Schumann resonance from space. This comes as a surprise, since current models of Schumann resonance predict these waves should be caged at lower altitude, between the ground and a layer of Earth's atmosphere called the ionosphere.

"Researchers didn't expect to observe these resonances in space," says Fernando Simoes, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "But it turns out that energy is leaking out and this opens up many other possibilities to study our planet from above."

Simoes is the first author on a paper about these observations that appeared online Nov. 16 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and will appear in the print publication in December. He explains that the concept of resonance in general is fairly simple: adding energy at the right time will help any given phenomenon grow. Think of a swing -- if you push it back just as it hits the top of its arc, you add speed. Push it backwards in the middle of its swing, and you will slow it down. When it comes to waves, resonance doesn't occur because of a swing-like push, but because a series of overlapping waves are synchronized such that the crests line up with the other crests and the troughs line up with the other troughs. This naturally leads to a much larger wave than one where the crests and troughs cancel each other out.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111129103316.htm

[dtexdem]

1. Aha, so them illegal space aliens are stealing our lightning!

Obviously just a sneaky part of their plot to "probe" us all.

;-)

[BadgerKid]

2. If only de Broglie could see that graphic. n/t

[TalkingDog]

3. Reminds me of one of my favorite little kid stories.

I was at a neighbor's house and picked up a Science Magazine. The cover showed a huge lightning strike on a city at night.

Thinking it an interesting factoid, I read the tag line across the top of the page to the 9 year old neighbor child: "By the time you read this sentence, lightning will have struck the earth 1000 times.

No sooner were the words out of my mouth when he shouted at me with a look of horror on his face "Don't read it again!"

[Sedona]

4. oooooo baby..., nerd porn

Can this energy be harnessed to propel my new Chevy Malibu?