Abstract
Abstract. The Earth's electrical environment hosts a giant electrical circuit, often referred to as the global electric circuit (GEC), linking the various sources of electrical generators located in the lower atmosphere, the ionosphere and the magnetosphere. The middle atmosphere (stratosphere and mesosphere) has been traditionally believed to be passively transmitting electric fields generated elsewhere. Some observations have reported anomalously large electric fields at these altitudes, and the scientific community has had to revisit the earlier hypothesis time and again. At stratospheric altitudes and especially at low latitudes, horizontal electric fields are believed to be of ionospheric origin. Though measurements of these fields from a balloon platform are challenging because of their small magnitudes (around a few mV m−1), a suitably designed long-duration balloon experiment capable of detecting such small fields can provide useful information on the time evolution of ionospheric electric fields, which is otherwise possible only using radar or satellite in situ measurements. We present herein details of one such experiment, BEENS (Balloon Experiment on the Electrodynamics of Near Space), carried out from a low-latitude site in India. The instrument package for this experiment is comprised of four deployable booms for measurements of horizontal electric fields and one inclined boom for vertical electric field measurements, all equipped with conducting spheres at the tip. The experiment was conducted from Hyderabad (17.5° N, 78.6° E) during the post-midnight hours on 14 December 2013. In spite of a few shortcomings we report herein, a noticeable feature of the observations has been the detection of horizontal electric fields of ∼ 5 mV m−1 at the stratospheric altitudes of ∼ 35 km.
Highlights
The various sources of the electrical generators located in the lower atmosphere, the ionosphere and the magnetosphere and the currents flowing through them as well as between them and Earth constitute a giant electrical circuit often referred to as the global electric circuit (GEC; see Rycroft et al, 2012, for recent advances on this topic)
We examine the behavior of the three components of the stratospheric electric fields
As quiet-time ionospheric electric fields at low latitudes are expected to be in the range of 1–3 mV m−1, we suggest atmospheric gravity waves to be a potential source for the generation of electric fields of magnitudes in the range of 4–6 mV m−1 reported in this work
Summary
The various sources of the electrical generators located in the lower atmosphere, the ionosphere and the magnetosphere and the currents flowing through them as well as between them and Earth constitute a giant electrical circuit often referred to as the global electric circuit (GEC; see Rycroft et al, 2012, for recent advances on this topic). The classical picture of the GEC incorporates the global thunderstorm activity as the only source, with the currents flowing from the thunderclouds charging the ionosphere to a few 100 kV with respect to the Earth and the discharging currents leaking through the atmosphere over rest of the region.
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