Recent news
On the level of atmospheric electric field fluctuations at the long periods: T=1-100 days
- Institute of Applied Physics RAS, Russia
One of many goals of atmospheric electricity investigations is the search
of possible direct influence of solar activity on the global electric
circuit (GEC) state. The correlation of GEC characteristics and
quasi-periodic or sporadic solar-terrestrial physics factors cold be the
evidence of that influence. The current absence of such evidences means,
that if direct influence of solar activity on GEC exists, it is very small
and masked by self-fluctuations of GEC characteristics of troposphere
origin. This paper investigates the background level of atmospheric
electric field fluctuations at very large periods (T»1 day), above which
one can try to detect the cycled relations of solar activity with GEC. The
data of two electrostatic flux meters (field-mill type) Boltek-EFM-100,
separated by distance of 6 km and placed on the buildings of the Institute
of applied physics and the Institute of microstructures physics at Nizhniy
Novgorod, were used for the analysis. Continuous rows of electric field
values and day average temperatures at the ground surface from June 2012
to March 2013 were analyzed. Correlative and spectral analysis methods and
also spectral adaptive analysis method were used for data processing. The
basic results were: 1. Spectral density of electric field fluctuations at
periods 1-100 days may be described by power law with index -0.5;
root-mean-square deviation (in the large frequency band) is 40% from
average E-field value. Smooth frequency dependence of field fluctuations
spectral density is analogical to frequency dependence of atmospheric
turbulence spectral density, for which structure function reaches
saturation at this time intervals. 2. In particular, around (1/27
days)-harmonic at the band (1/30 days)-(1/24 days) root-mean-square value
of atmospheric electric field fluctuations is 123. There is no strong
direct correlation between flux meters data and temperature. Spectral
density of temperature fluctuations falls down by power law with index
-1.7 (5/3), i.e. more quickly, then for electric field fluctuations. At
the same time, in some narrow bands quasi-periodic correlated disturbances
of E and T exist, which are evidently related to characteristic times of
air mass transportation and which independently affect on the both
parameters analyzed.