Lightning-made Waves In Earth's Atmosphere Leak Into Space

TheNextCorner sends this quote from NASA: "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. ... NASA's Vector Electric Field Instrument aboard the U.S. Air Force's Communications/Navigation Outage Forecast System 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."

Leaking energy

[RightwingNutjob]

Is this like other waveguide phenomena, where the first or second-order approximation says the energy vanishes exponentially within a fraction of a wavelength around the waveguide, but if you don't want your radar set (or microwave oven) to explode, you still need to invest heavily in ventilation and/or liquid cooling?

Re:Makes no sense

[Fluffeh]

Well, it's not so much the wind escaping the chamber, more along the lines of the sound making it out. The only thing "getting out" is electromagnetic waves - and to be honest, I am surprised that the atmosphere actually keeps most of them in. If you think about it, I guess is makes sense, given you can bounce radio signals off the atmosphere to get the signal past the horizon and such - but I was just surprised that electromagnetic waves from lightning get caught inside our atmosphere.

Class M Planet Discovery

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose Schumann resonance occur on similar planets as well, and should be detectable.

Re:Makes no sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it's not so much the wind escaping the chamber, more along the lines of the sound making it out. The only thing "getting out" is electromagnetic waves - and to be honest, I am surprised that the atmosphere actually keeps most of them in. If you think about it, I guess is makes sense, given you can bounce radio signals off the atmosphere to get the signal past the horizon and such - but I was just surprised that electromagnetic waves from lightning get caught inside our atmosphere.

You can hear them on your radio around 2-3mhz.

The frequencies

[IceFoot]

According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], the resonances occur at extremely low frequencies (ELF) around 7.83 (fundamental), 14.3, 20.8, 27.3 and 33.8 Hz. That's Hertz, not megaHertz. Now, how can we tune them in? I, for one, do not own a radio that can receive those frequencies.

Prior Art

[Anonymous Coward]

The so-called discovered phenomenon is precisely what Tesla was using in the 1890s to transmit power. He also said that he had bounced signals off the moon using the same method. Thunderstorms were exactly the method he used to discover that the electrical standing waves existed around the Earth- his detectors showed that the signals from lightning emitted by storms got quiter as they travelled away, then louder again, as the storm passed along the peak and trough of a wave and thus attenuated the signal in his detector. He used this discovery to calculate how the earth and atmosphere could be used as an immense capacitor and power pumped into it, and could be picked up by an appropriately tuned receiver anywhere on the earth with transmission losses of between 1-5%. At the time it was like voodoo magic- now we know it as simple high voltage/high frequency alternating current. Get the numbers right and its not very hard.