Variation of fair weather atmospheric electricity at Marsta Observatory, Sweden, 1993–1998

Abstract

A modified atmospheric electrical station of the Kasemir–Dolezalek construction is continuously operating in the Marsta Observatory (59°56′N,17°35′W) located in rural area 10 km north of Uppsala, Sweden. The routinely recorded parameters are the electric field, positive and negative polar conductivities of air, and space charge density. The effect of possible local anthropogenic air pollution on the fair weather atmospheric electric measurements at Marsta is estimated according to Sheftel et al., 1994a (J. Geophys. Res. 99, 10,793) by comparing the Sunday and weekday values of air conductivity. The effect of local air pollution appears essentially less than at other evaluated continental atmospheric electric stations. The natural periodic variations of fair weather electric field and vertical air-earth current averaged over many years at Marsta are compared with the periodic variations of electric field measured during the Carnegie expeditions over the oceans where the global component of variations dominates over the local component. The diurnal variations of electric field and vertical current at Marsta are well correlated with the Carnegie curve during winter and ill correlated during summer. The correlation coefficient reaches 98% for the winter measurements of vertical air-earth current. In addition, a test has been carried out for a hypothesis that numerical reduction of the data according to the local temperature and wind variation could suppress the local component of fair weather atmospheric electric variations and thus help to study the global component of variation. The hypothesis proved to be inadequate. The reduction suppresses the annual variation, but the shape of the diurnal variation remains the same and the correlation with the Carnegie curve is even worse than in the case of unreduced measurements. The Marsta Observatory is recommended as a basis station for long-term routine atmospheric electric measurements to gather data for the study of climate variation because of the large weight of global component in the variation of fair weather air-earth vertical current and electric field.