Balloon Observations of the Electric Field Over South Pole: Convection Patterns

Bering, Edgar A.; Benbrook, J. R.; Byrne, Gregory; Liang, Danqing; Lin, Zhongmin

doi:10.1007/978-94-009-0979-3_10

Cited by 1 publication

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“…It has proven very difficult to sense the flow of plasma in the magnetosphere remotely. Measurements at high latitude of ionospheric convection patterns have been made by Earth‐orbiting satellites [ Heppner , 1972a, 1972b; Heelis et al , 1983; Heppner and Maynard , 1987] and ground‐based radars [ Foster , 1983, 1984; Foster et al , 1981, 1986] and other techniques such as balloon measurements [ Mozer and Serlin , 1969; Mozer and Manka , 1971; Bering et al , 1989a, 1989b]. One of the major effects of the flow of plasma in the magnetosphere is a substantial magnetospheric contribution to variations of ionospheric potential.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2004

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[1] 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 K p index.

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