Mustafa Asfur Research website

The global electrical circuitThe Earth’s surface, ocean and solid, and the ionosphere are both highly conductive. The atmosphere conducts electricity because of the presence of positive and negative ions plus free electrons. Conductivity is poor near sea level but increases rapidly with height up to the ionosphere, also it is greater at polar latitudes than equatorial. The conductivity near sea level is low because there are fewer ions and those ions tend to become attached to the larger aerosol particles that are more common near the surface.

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 When you think of lightning, you think of a thunderstorm. Many people also assume that hurricanes have a lot of lightning because they are made up of hundreds of thunderstorms.

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Atlantic hurricane activity has increased significantly since 1995 , but the underlying causes of this increase remain uncertain. It is widely thought that rising Atlantic sea surface temperatures have had a role in this, but the magnitude of this contribution is not known. Here we quantify this contribution for storms that formed in the tropical North Atlantic, Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico; these regions together account for most of the hurricanes that make landfall in the United States. We show that a statistical model based on two environmental variables—local sea surface temperature and an atmospheric wind field—can replicate a large proportion of the variance in tropical Atlantic hurricane frequency and activity between 1965 and 2005.

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