T-storm pseudolaser effect!

Wild electrostatic speculations from staying up all night. Banish them from your head ...by typing them into SED!

During the formation of lightning leaders, sometimes the stepped leaders extend themselves quite fast. This looks instantaneous on those 7000fps youtube vids. Lightning RF then wouldn't be a big snap, instead it would be a crash, a roar of small pulses. That's got me thinking.

If normally lightning's various leader tips are like relaxation oscillators all stepping out of phase, then the RF output of lightning leaders in the VLF spectrum might be very low. Why? For each emitted pulse at zero phase, there's be a nearby leader emitting another pulse at 180. In the nearfield region (way below 100KHz) the RF might be strong, but there'd be very little farfield wave energy. Most of the emitted RF energy would be a hash of HF noise.

So, what if we synchronize the leaders? Blast the thunderstorm with, say, 30KHz vlf radiation. Any leader which was just about to step, would tend to step in synch with the "stimulating beam." Its propagating radiation would sum in phase, but only in the same direction as our broadcast. During the lightning strike, the thunderstorm would momentarily become a coherent VLF amplifier. Our beam of RF would be stronger on the far side of the t-storm. Like a huge load of NE2 pulsers, all flashing in synch with this "clock signal" we've given it. For a strong enough "clock" we might even synchronize some CG strikes, not just the leader steps.

OK, now let the amplified vlf wave circle the Earth and come back to hit the t-storm again (or hit some other ones.) During afternoon on the African coast the daily t-storms tend to triple the Earth's normal vertical DC e-field. That should be the best time to try this. Launch your cw vlf beam at Africa, see if it comes back from the opposite direction, only stronger.

So, rather than each lightning pulse having its VLF output canceled by a nearby unsynchronized pulse, all the pulses would lock onto our

30KHz clock. Give the global standing waves a kick, see if it becomes self-sustaining. If viewed in the RF spectrum, then the usual comb of Schumann Waveguide peaks would be reduced, and just one peak would be reinforced. The broadband t-storm noise gets harnessed to amplify our signal. And since the normal cancellation effect is removed, *more* t-storm vlf radiation would be emitted than usual. T-storm gets less heated by lightning, with more CW VLF output. It would be like turning an LED into a laser. (Or like putting some weakly glowing ZnS(Cu) phosphor into a tuned optical cavity. Big green flash, phosphor stops glowing.)

So, does this whole thing happen naturally? The signature of the effect would be seen in the VLF Schumann spectrum. Peaks which normally show a waveguide resonator Q in the single digits, would suddenly show the enormous Q of an active sine oscillator. Phase noise of an oscillator is after all a bit narrower in freq than the bandwidth of a passive RLC.

Would there be any obvious phenomena caused by this? After all, the overall effect would be like being inside a microwave oven. RF driving of plasmoids? Disruption of e-layer? Maybe we'd see some weird aurora stripes far from the arctic. Oooo, if the initial "clock" was spontaneously initiated by a single t-storm, then the overall RF standing wave would appear as circular bullseyes with the storm at the center (plus a second hotspot pattern at the Earth antipode.) The VLF intensity might then be fairly low everywhere else, but grow to huge values near the triggering t-storm. Good reason why the phenomenon might only be rarely detected, even if it's not a rare event. But the RF wouldn't be coming from that storm, instead that storm would be "massaging" all the storms on Earth, and clocking them so they broadcast way more VLF than normal ...with the phase adjusted to beam their RF towards the triggering broadcast. Look for "impossible" electrical phenomena associated with t-storms. Any corona discharges created by that storm might start squealing in synch. (The freq could be low enough to be in the audio range. Or maybe cause all the dogs to howl or hide in the basement.) Barbwire fences might start arcing over, or their wires might get hot. Flourescent tubes could light by themselves if you took them outdoors (outdoors during a big thunderstorm of course.)

Reply to
Bill Beaty
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HAARP, those ionizing rain makers in the Middle East etc blah blah...

--
Dirk

http://www.neopax.com/technomage/ - My new book
Reply to
Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

It appears to me that low frequency RF from lightning is very strong, but from the "return strokes".

I seem to think that an electric field change of at least 10's of volts per meter, more likely 100's of volts per meter, would be needed to make a major change in the behavior of lightning leader strokes. Square this and divide by 377 ohms, the impedance of free space, and that means around a watt to around a kilowatt of RF per square meter. To blast a thunderstorm with that requires megawatts to multigigawatts.

That 377 ohm figure: It is all of these:

1) Product of "4pi K-prime" ("permeability of a vacuum" in henries/meter) and speed of light in vacuum (2.997 E8 m/sec) 2) Square root of ratio of 4pi K-prime to Eo, "dielectric constant of a vacuum" (8.854 E-12 farads/meter) 3) Reciprocal of product of speed of light and Eo.

(Speed of light in vacuum is reciprocal of square root of the products of 4pi-K-prime and Eo.)

--
 - Don Klipstein (don@misty.com)
Reply to
Don Klipstein

I thought HAARP was HF. They don't have any 10KM antenna like mil sub comms. How low can they go? And exactly why would RF have any weather effects? Sounds like an attempt at "guilt by association." Guilt by resemblance? If you don't like pseudoscientists, don't employ the fallacies they're always using.

Driven VLF standing waves would produce unexplained corona events, or CW arcing rather than the brief sparks during CG lightning. Or the "maser theory" of Ball Lightning plasmoids. Well, here's your maser, only it would operate well below 100KHz, where the ducted waves are still able to pass many times around the Earth. Here at the UW our WWLN lightning global triangulation project uses 100KHz as a standard, since those pulses don't make it round twice. Well, a bit does leak past, so their fancy algorithm has to avoid counting any pulses twice if they synch up with ~7.8Hz delay. The 100KHz antenna research array wouldn't see any "t-storm pseudolaser" if it existed, since it ignores the deep VLF band where Schumann resonances live.

WWLL realtime t-storm imaging project

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The prev message was inspired by (besides by sleep dep,) by the optics phenomenon where noise emissions from a pumped laser medium tend to cancel each other and suppress spontaneous emission, while a strong coherent beam can induce the medium to "dump" all at once. If lightning leader stepping is slightly analogous to single atoms' electron transitions, then the "clocking" supplied by a coherent CW e- field could synchronize all those small plasma antennas. Not only would they form a phased array which emits an RF beam, but they'd also emit far more watts into the farfield region than unsychronized leaders ever could. Instead of low power "laser speckle," you get a pulse of single-lobe interference pattern.

((((((((((((((((((((((( ( ( (o) ) ) ))))))))))))))))))))))) William J. Beaty Research Engineer beaty, chem washington edu UW Chem Dept, Bagley Hall RM74 billb, eskimocom Box 351700, Seattle, WA 98195-1700 ph 206-543-6195

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Reply to
Bill Beaty

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You're dead on, if I recall a Tesla paper by the Corum bros back in the 80s. They wanted to know how much total power would be needed to drive the Earth resonance to equal the usual t-storm DC field of 100V/ M. I think they got a value around 10MW for a lumped model, assuming the cavity has a Q of ~10. I might have that paper in old stuff: see what assumptions they made. (Then the only problem for Nikola is, how to match your 1KHz transmitter with no 75KM 1/4wave tower. Hire some ranch hands to string a 75KM barbwire fence?)

Same problem with this t-storm idea: no antenna tower, difficult to test. Hook your Wimshurst machine to a very long fence, then add a spark gap to ground! But if this isn't just delusional, then maybe storms are unstable and can spontaneously oscillate. If lightning can drive the ionospheric duct cavity like an oscillator, and if it normally resembles a "pumped medium" operating below threshold, we'd detect it as some broadband multimode oscillations: a comb of a few hundred spectrum spikes at all the cavity modes below ~100KHz. We'd see anomalously high Q, since we're looking at CW oscillators rather than noise-driven resonance peaks. I think optical cavities do that too, no? But drive it with a stimulating beam, and nonlinear effects take over. All the other modes lose the competition, leaving one big frequency line. Ooo, there's an idea: what wavelength of max system gain. The natural peak in frequency operation would be limited on the high end by low Q from cavity losses at wavelengths shorter than the thickness of the atmosphere, while at the longwave end a t-storm pumps out most rf energy as ?? uSec pulses (gotta look that up.) If something ever kicked it into oscillation, would it be in the audio range, so you hear a pure tone coming from charged bushes and raindrops?

As with microwave ovens, don't assume that we're driving a simple load resistor. Radiation spreading outwards will get re-focused by the ionospheric duct at the antipodal point, and also at the transmitter. A high-Q cavity can accumulate quite a large e-field with quite a small drive power at a resonance peak. Classic spectrum measurements say Q=3D10. NASA measurements from the 80s say Q=3D few hundred. But is the actual cavity Q near 100, or is that an artifact ...of unsuspected oscillation! :)

((((((((((((((((((((((( ( ( (o) ) ) ))))))))))))))))))))))) William J. Beaty Research Engineer beaty, chem washington edu UW Chem Dept, Bagley Hall RM74 billb, eskimocom Box 351700, Seattle, WA 98195-1700 ph 206-543-6195

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Reply to
Bill Beaty

They use HF to heat the ionosphere. There is/was speculation that the US military could modulate the heating effects and/or some other non-liner plasma property with LF information for comms with submarines.

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--
Dirk

http://www.neopax.com/technomage/ - My new book
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Reply to
Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

What work has been done to detect laser-type oscillations in thunderstorms? Should a thunderstorm-rich region of the atmosphere be capable of "lasing", then I suspect that an especially strong lightning stroke such as a "positive giant" should be able to trigger such a thing. "Positive lightning" is said by Wiki to have 6-10 times the charge and the voltage difference of the usual "negative lightning", amounting to

36-100 times the typically-~100-plus megajoule energy of the usual "negative lightning". Wiki also says that "positive lightning" generates "huge quantities of ELF and VLF radio waves".

(For that matter, the Wikipedia article on lightning does say that "positive lightning" has been known to trigger "upper atmosphere lightning", presumably nearby and above the troposphere).

For that matter, soon is a good time to look for this. Late winter and very early spring is prime time for south-central and SE USA and Gulf, nearby Atlantic and nearby bits of Mexico to get organized patterns of severe thunderstorms, while close to the antipode thereof is tropical SE Indian Ocean S of Indonesia and NW of Australia, which in February-March or so is prone to large numbers of thunderstorms.

The opposite time of year, late July through September or so, is close to a prime time for western and NW Australia to get organized patterns of severe thunderstorms, while nearly-antipodal SE USA and nearby tropical Gulf and Atlantic waters have numerous thunderstorms.

--
 - Don Klipstein (don@misty.com)
Reply to
Don Klipstein

Google for "sprites" and "elves" and "blue jets" with reference to lightning. If I recall correctly, these rather bizarre upper- atmosphere phenomena do seem to occur more frequently in association with a positive-lightning stroke.

--
Dave Platt                                    AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page:  http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
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Reply to
Dave Platt

None I'm aware of. It just suddenly struck me that an existing strong CW signal might be amplified by nonlinear processes in lightning. Also I realized that "sferics" radiation emitted by lightning might be far smaller than maximum, since random-timed emissions over microseconds would cancel in the far field, yet synchronized emissions would reinforce each other, leading to larger net radiated wattage. The only legit research has been with physicists searching for an energy source for Ball Lightning. The "Maser Theory" of BL proposes that a t-storm somehow generates an RF field persisting over a scale of minutes. That way a BL plasmoid could be externally driven, rather than having to somehow enclose large EM energy in a metastable state. But why would a t-storm ever transmit high-wattage CW? It might, if lightning processes were driving the global Schumann duct, and the cavity resonator did actually have a higher Q than the one quoted widely in textbooks.

Hobbyists doing SWL at VLF freqs probably wouldn't be looking for this, since it probably would be ultrasonic and unmodulated. Your VLF receiver would need a bfo.

Hey, I just remembered something cool! In The Amateur Scientist there was a project where two loop antennas were fed to an P7 persistence XY oscilloscope, and lightning pulses appeared as radial spikes pointing towards the storm. Aha, May 1963,

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.html As a kid I'd wanted to build that. Even acquired the two hula hoops! :) They mention unexplained patterns seen, but don't mention CW rather than just pulses. 85KHz 'tornado oscillator!'

((((((((((((((((((((((( ( ( (o) ) ) ))))))))))))))))))))))) William J. Beaty Research Engineer beaty, chem washington edu UW Chem Dept, Bagley Hall RM74 billb, eskimocom Box 351700, Seattle, WA 98195-1700 ph 206-543-6195

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wbeaty

Dead link Bill. Anything else?

85KHz. Isn't that about twice the 42..8KHz Keely frequency?

Robert Striker

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Robert Striker

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For the last time:  I am not a mad scientist, I'm just a very ticked off
scientist!!!
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Michael A. Terrell

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He didn't use 85K, he used broadband audio tube amp.

AM static: RDF shows that it comes from specific directions! Cool!

((((((((((((((((((((((( ( ( (o) ) ) ))))))))))))))))))))))) William J. Beaty Research Engineer beaty, chem washington edu UW Chem Dept, Bagley Hall RM74 billb, eskimocom Box 351700, Seattle, WA 98195-1700 ph 206-543-6195

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Reply to
Bill Beaty

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