Whistler echo trains triggered by energetic winter lightning.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 39169015.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-024-51684-0 and PMC identifier 11339424.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
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.