What is it about?
Electricity from thunderstorms and rain clouds is distributed around the planet, through processes which can be represented as a simple electric circuit. One part of that circuit is a capacitor. Our paper shows that the atmosphere's capacitor has a similar value to the supercapacitor used in computers to provide a brief back-up power source. The atmosphere's supercap works in the same way, smoothing out variations as electric power comes and goes as storms and lightning change.
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Why is it important?
The atmosphere's supercap keeps the electrical conditions across the planet steady. Some insects - and spiders in particular - seem to exploit this, and it leads to charging of cloud droplets in layer clouds. So finding out about the supercap is important to physics and biology in the atmosphere
Perspectives
Inhomogeneity in the vertical ionisation of the air, with the conducting ground surface beneath and the highly ionized Earth’s ionosphere above, leads to two global circuit (GEC) phenomena. One is the DC, or electrical global circuit, and the other is the AC global circuit (also named the Schumann resonance) - both circuits are driven by global thunderstorms and lightning. Our work explores the DC and AC circuit concepts to confirm that the time constant, the timescale on which this excitation diminishes, is about ten minutes. This is equivalent to a separation between plates of a hypothetical parallel-plate capacitor we call the global circuit capacitor model to be about 2 km; the value of the capacitor is found to be 2.3 F. A longer timescale of the global atmospheric electric circuit may be important for climate as the higher steadiness of GEC current influences low-level clouds. In addition, a number of biological situations with influential electrical effects are reviewed, implying that more prolonged existence of background electrical conditions may support the specific behaviour of organisms.
Anna Odzimek
Institute of Geophysics Polish Academy of Sciences
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The global circuit capacitor and two new ways of deriving the time constant of the global atmospheric electric circuit, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, August 2025, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.jastp.2025.106545.
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