Abstract

The electrodynamics of the Earth's atmosphere and ionosphere has been a topic of considerable interests for many decades. There are three main sources of current in this circuit, thunderstorms, the ionospheric dynamo, and the magnetospheric dynamo. This presentation will begin with a review of th... Show moreThe electrodynamics of the Earth's atmosphere and ionosphere has been a topic of considerable interests for many decades. There are three main sources of current in this circuit, thunderstorms, the ionospheric dynamo, and the magnetospheric dynamo. This presentation will begin with a review of the both the ionospheric and magnetospheric dynamos. The ionospheric dynamo primarily operates at equatorial latitudes and is driven by tidal motions of the neutral atmosphere. The magnetospheric dynamo is driven by the coupling between the Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind. Current modeling of these systems is primarily global scale and does not consider coupling with the thunderstorm sources, but we will discuss some of the early work in this area and pathways for including this modeling in global scale models. Show less