Lightning storm formation, frequency and severity linked by researchers to high-speed solar winds

   A paper recently published by researchers at England’s University of Reading cited evidence indicating that high-speed solar winds play a major role forming lightning storms in the earth’s atmosphere as well as determining their frequency and severity. Cosmic rays (supernova-generated energized particles from deep space) are already known to play a similar role, but to a lesser extent because, in order to reach the earth’s atmosphere, cosmic rays must first penetrate the solar wind, which is a continuous outgoing stream of plasma (ionized electrons and protons) released from the sun’s upper atmosphere.
   Flowing outward at supersonic speeds to great distances, the solar wind creates the gigantic semi-porous bubble (heliosphere) which helps protect our solar system from the harsher elements of the surrounding interstellar medium. Since the solar wind’s one-million-mile-per-hour particle stream fluctuates in density, temperature and velocity, its energizing effect on the earth’s ionosphere (located in the earth’s outer atmosphere) likewise fluctuates. The more the ionosphere becomes electrified, the greater the likelihood that influxes of charged particles will filter downward and become engaged in the complex process of lightning storm formation.
   According to Reading University researchers, whenever solar flares or other upsurges in the sun’s magnetic activity propel increased amounts of charged plasma particles into the earth’s atmosphere, there is a “substantial” corresponding increase in lightning rates on earth for up to forty days afterwards. The university’s five-year study centered on data collected by NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer (a spacecraft launched to study the solar wind), and by the UK’s Office of Meteorology. After each solar event, British researchers detected an average of 422 lightning strikes within 310 miles of central England, compared to an average of 321 lighting strikes during the absence of such solar occurrences.
   These more frequent lightning strikes appear to be classic examples of the electrical discharge mechanism at work. When electrostatic energy stored in clouds exceeds the limit of what the clouds can contain, the energy is released, most often in the form of lightning storms. But when inflows of charged solar plasma are dramatically increased by means of solar flares and other types of solar explosions, much more violent terrestrial lightning storm activity can occur. “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.”

   Not all incoming solar particles are deflected away by the earth’s magnetic field. The university’s researchers found that plenty of energetic solar plasma particles were able to penetrate the cloud-forming regions of the earth’s atmosphere — a testimonial to the sun’s dominant influence over the mysterious mechanisms which control the earth’s weather. And because the earth’s protective magnetic field is now porous, the number of solar plasma particles breaching the earth’s magnetic defenses has increased exponentially.
   In the year 2000, NASA’s space exploration partner, the European Space Agency (ESA), launched the CLUSTER mission, a constellation of four identical spacecraft flying in tetrahedral formation around the earth and using state-of-the-art instrumentation to study the natural physical processes occurring within and in the near vicinity of the earth’s magnetosphere. CLUSTER observed that it is a lot easier for solar wind particles to penetrate the earth’s magnetosphere than scientists previously thought. In a recently published paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research, it was reported that the magnetopause -– the outer region of the earth’s magnetic shield –- is breached in numerous places by the incoming solar wind -– and is therefore acting more like a sieve than a barrier.
   At present, 40,000 km wide swirls of solar plasma — (referred to as “Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities”) — are continuously forming on the outer edge of the magnetosphere, weakening the magnetopause, breaking magnetic lines, and allowing swirls (or whirlpools) of plasma to slip inside the magnetosphere, prompting sudden, dramatic reconfigurations and reconnections of the earth’s magnetic field lines.
   The sun’s nearness and awesome size (one million times larger than the earth), coupled with its unfathomable volumes of energy and relentless outpouring of charged particles render it a potential source of endless and unimaginably devastating storms on an earth whose protective magnetic shield has suddenly begun to malfunction, allowing gargantuan deposits of hot and cold solar plasma to enter inside the earth’s magnetosphere, accumulate inside the earth’s plasmasphere (which abuts the earth’s outer atmosphere), and electrify the earth’s ionosphere – creating perfect conditions for the perfect storm.

   In 2008, NASA’s five THEMIS spacecraft discovered a giant breach in the earth’s magnetosphere four times wider than the earth itself, exposing the entire day-side of the earth to the incoming blast of the solar wind and (according to THEMIS instruments) allowing solar plasma particles to pour through the breach at the rate of one to the twenty-seventh power per second. “That’s a one followed by 27 zeros,” remarked one of the THEMIS researchers, who further went on to explain that a magnetosphere loaded with plasma particles can become like a room filled with gas, awaiting a spark to ignite it. Such a spark could arrive in the form of a particularly fierce, earth-bound coronal mass ejection –- a multi-billion-ton blast of ionized gas and magnetic fields from the sun’s corona.
  
PHOTO AND DATA SOURCES include the European Space Agency, NASA and UNIVERSE TODAY