Whistler echo trains triggered by energetic winter lightning

I. Kolmašová (), O. Santolík and J. Manninen
Additional contact information
I. Kolmašová: Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences
O. Santolík: Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences
J. Manninen: Sodankylä

Nature Communications, 2024, vol. 15, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Lightning generated electromagnetic impulses propagating in the magnetospheric plasma disperse into whistlers – several seconds long radio wave signals with decreasing frequency. Sometimes, multiple reflections form long echo trains containing many whistlers with increasing dispersion. On January 3, 2017, two necessary prerequisites – a pronounced lightning activity and a magnetospheric plasma duct – allowed for observations of a large number of whistler echo trains by the high-latitude station in Kannuslehto, Finland. Our investigation reveals that the duct existed for nearly eight hours. We show that causative lightning sferics arrived to the duct entry from three different winter thunderstorms: a small storm at the Norwegian coast, which produced energetic lightning capable to trigger echo trains in 50% of cases, and two large storms at unexpectedly distant locations in the Mediterranean region. Our results show that intense thunderstorms can repetitively feed electromagnetic energy into a magnetospheric duct and form whistler echo trains after subionospheric propagation over distances as large as 4000 km.

Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-51684-0 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:15:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-024-51684-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-51684-0

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().