At https://spaceweather.com … see archive for 19th June, 2024 … we are told the super solar storm of May 10th 2024 did more than spark some of the best aurora for years, it also electrified our planet. Yes, electrified Earth. Sensors monitored a significant change in atmospheric electricity. Earth’s entire global electrical circuit was affected by the storm.
It seems Earth has a ‘global electrical circuit’ – created, they go on to say, by thunderstorms which build up a charge difference between the ground and the ionosphere. There are around 40,000 thunderstorms every day all over the earth. They act like batteries pumping electricty to the top of the atmosphere. On its own, air is not a great conductor of electricity. However, cosmic rays from space ionise our atmosphere and create conductivity for currents to flow. The very air you breathe is then electrified.
At https://www.sciencenews.org/article/50-years-ago-sun-earth-lightning …. here we are also told solar activity is linked to lightning, according to a new research paper in Nature [May 24th 2024], in spite of year to year variations in the incidence of lightning. The cyclic variation has a period of roughly 11 years – coinciding with the 1 year solar cycle. How that happens is a mystery.
At https://www.sciencenews.org/article/hunga-tonga-volcanic-eruption-high-altitude-lightning … here we are told the Hunga Tonga Ha’apai volcanic eruption touched space and created a lightning blitz. Not only did it inject water so high it touched space but it produced the greatest concentration of lightning ever detected [in the modern world]. It also released an enormous amount of energy, so much so it disturbed the ionosphere to such an extent it rivaled a solar magnetic storm. Not only was water vapour thrust up into the atmosphere but it was pushed even higher, into the mesosphere – virtually to the edge of space. On the day of the eruption there were at least 400,000 lightning strikes at and around the volcano. It even distorted plasma thousands of kilometres above the earth.
At https://doi.org/10.5194/angeo-36-633-2018 … here we have a research paper by multiple Japanese authors that claim the time it takes for the Sun to spin around, 27 days, coincides with lightning activity in Japan in the 18th and 19th centuries. Basically, lightning increases as solar activity increases.