Pergamon

0021-9169(94)00075-l

Schumann resonances in magnetic field components

Martin Fiillekrug
Institut fur Geophysik der Universitat Gottingen, Herzberger Landstrabe 180. D-37075 Clottingen
Germany

(Received in final fi)rm 19 Ma!, 1994 ; acwptc)d 27 Juna 1994)

Abstract--The lnstitut fur Geophysik Gottingen has facilities to record the time varying magnetic com-
ponents H and D at extremely low frequencies (ELF) (0.1-20 Hz) continuously over several days, with a
sampling rate of 100 Hz. The lower ELF-range is characterized by anthropogenic noise and the first two
Schumann resonance modes of the Earth-ionosphere cavity. The local observations near Giittingen are
disturbed by thunderstorms during the summer that contribute a small part of the energy to the global
thunderstorm activity. Transient natural signals with amplitudes of about IO pT are superimposed on a
continuous noise level of about 1 pT; both exhibit the Schumann resonance periodicities. The signals show
a tendency to repeat after about 2 s which may suggest excitation by whistler-trains.
The Schumann resonances are investigated by an analysis of the autocovariance matrix yielding a robust
estimation of the amplitude, damping and frequency. All these parameters shoe a characteristic directional
dependence and variability during the day. The amplitudes represent the excitation with different source
locations of thunderstorm activity around the world, generating a dipole field within the resonator. while
the damping and centre-frequency are related to solar activity coupling to the lower ionosphere.

1. INTRODUCTION ELF-range into sources outside the ionosphere and

inside the EarthKonosphere cavity. Pulsations OCCLII
The lower extremely low frequency range between 1
at frequencies below 4 Hz originating from the
and 100 Hz is characterized by an electromagnetic
magnetosphere, most likely connected with trans-
resonance phenomenon in the spherical shell bounded
verse-electric fields, while Schumann resonances pro-
by the Earth and ionosphere, denoted the Earth-iono-
pagating in the transverse-magnetic mode within the
sphere cavity. These Schumann resonance modes pro-
Earth-ionosphere cavity originate from various
vide global integrated information about the
source locations of thunderstorm activity around the
excitation and propagation parameters. Recent
world.
improvements in electronic equipment now permit the
The Schumamr resonances may be described as a
monitoring of excitation by the global thunderstorm
standing wave in the dissipative Earth-ionosphere
activity (Sentman and Fraser, 1991 ; Williams, 1992).
cavity. While the real part of the complex propagation
Further observations will help to characterize the
parameter
excitation by means of a geoelectric index that will
include information about the electromagnetic bal-
ance in the troposphere, while the propagation par-
ameters contain information about the coupling
describes the damping, the imaginary part is related
between solar activity and the lower ionosphere. This
to the frequency of the Schumann resonances. The
contribution attempts to give an idea about a method
propagation parameter can be derived by matching
of data analysis that is appropriate for the interpret-
the potentials of the field quantities in the lower iono-
ation of resonance phenomena, the first observational
sphere, including only the essential physical properties
results, some problems and opportunities which arise
that govern the propagation conditions (Greifinger
from continuous recordings of Schumann resonances.
and Greifinger, 1978). The conductivity in the tropo-
sphere is so small that a wave equation can be assumed
until the conduction and displacement currents
2. THEORY
become equal at the conduction boundary. at about
ln the first order approximation, the ionosphere can 40 km height, Exponentially increasing conductivity
be regarded as a low-pass filter that divides the lower leads to a Helmholtz equation in which diffusion
480 M. Full ekrug
dominates over propagation up to the reflection
boundary at about 80 km height. The detailed theor-
etical description in spherical coordinates leads to a
simple analytic expression for the propagation con-
stant (Sentman, 1990).
3. DATA ACQUISITION
The Institut fur Geophysik der Universitat Gbt-
tingen has facilities to record the magnetic field com-
ponents in the lower ELF range from 0.1 to 20 Hz.
The measurements have been carried out with induc-
tion coils consisting of 4.10 turns of copper wire,
showing a noise level of 55 fT* Hz- at 1 Hz and
3.3 fT*Hz-I* at 10 Hz, where 1 fT = IO- T. Thus
the recording instrument is well suited for scientific
research in view of its ability to record time-series
continously at high resolution, needed for the detec-
tion of the weak Schumann resonances with ampli-
tudes around 1 pT. The measurements of the time
varying magnetic field were taken with a sampling rate
of 100 Hz at different locations around Gottingen,
Germany.
The incoming data are divided into segments of a
quarter hour length and transformed into the fre-
quency domain by a discrete Fourier transform yield-
ing a spectral resolution of 1.1 mHz. The resonance
curve of the sensor is multiplied by the raw spectrum
which has been smoothed with a running mean of
66 mHz width and decimated to one smoothed value
every 33 mHz. Alternatively, they are filtered with a
rectangular band-pass filter from 1 to 16 Hz to obtain
instrumentally corrected time-series.
4. ANTHROPOGENIC NOISE AND NATURAL
DISTURBANCES
The first measurements were carried out at the Insti-
tut ftir Geophysik, only 1 km away from the city of
Giittingen, and are corrupted by anthropogenic noise
(Fig. 1, upper curve 1). The average spectrum is domi-
nated by sharp spectral features of the railway fre-
quency at 16.67 Hz and subharmonics of the power
supply network at 6.25 and 12.50 Hz. Random occur-
rences of spectral peaks with unknown origin differing
in energy and bandwidth are common, superimposed
on a broadband anthropogenic noise level. Further
measurements were done at the test-site of the Uni-
versity in Silberborn, 30 km from the city of Giittingen
that is well suited for the observation of Schumann
resonances (Fig. 1 lower curve 2). Except for the rail-
way frequency, no additional anthropogenic electro-
magnetic radiation is present. The average spectrum
Average spectra in H-component
Railway
16.66 Hz
Subhormanics of 50 Hz
ui 10
El
u
10
:
a 10
1
0 5 Freq&y (HZ{ 20
Fig. 1. Five day average power spectra of time intervals of a
quarter hour length in the H-component, smoothed with a
running mean of 66 mHz width and decimated to one value
every 33 mHz. Upper curve (1) 2631 December 1991 at
Gbttingen, lower curve (2) 5-10 April 1992 at Silberbom
in the nearby Solling forest. At Gbttingen, the broadband
anthropogenic noise level conceals the second Schumann
resonance.
of the H-component reveals the first two resonance
peaks of the Earth-ionosphere cavity at 8 and 14 Hz,
while the increase of the spectrum at frequencies below
4 Hz is due to pulsations.
Apart from anthropogenic noise, there are also dis-
turbances by natural sources. Local thunderstorms
often occur during the summer of the recording site,
raising the average spectral energy in the lower ELF
range. While regional thunderstorm activity is due to
cold front passages, exceeding the average natural
noise level by a factor of 100, thunderstorms generated
by local thermal convection exceed the average noise
level by a factor of 10. Both contribute a small part
of energy to the global thunderstorm activity.
5. NATURAL SIGNALS
The continuously recorded time series show a weak
natural noise level and superimposed signals denoted
flash, quiet-burst, noisy-burst and con-
tinuous (Fig. 2). They have been observed, classified
and interpreted as associated with flashes in thunder-
storms exciting the Schumann-resonances (Ogawa et
al., 1966). For detailed statistical analysis, a trigger
was used to extract single effects from a continuous
time series of 10 days length. The trigger was sensitive
to anomalously high variances, differences and absol-
ute values. These single-effects represent only 3% of
the recorded data. Their occurrence cannot be cor-
related with the daily variability of global thunder-
 Schumann resonances 3hl

16.0
29.3.92 16:44:25 ionosphere of the opposite hemisphere. Taking into
D-component account the length of the field line in Giittingen
12.0
and the phase velocity of the energy maximum of the
whistler at 1.5 kHz. the recurrence period can he
roughly estimated as 2.2 s. Thus, the recurrence
c behaviour suggests that part of these single-effects 14
,a/ 4.0 excited by whistlers (Abbas, 1968) or whistler trig:-
n gered flashes (Armstrong, 1987).
0.0

-4.0
6. DATA AUALYSIS

-e.oi,,,,,,,,.,,,,.,,,,,,,~,.,,.,,,,...,..,,, When the Schumann resonances are interpreted as

0 1 2 3
Time4 (~7 6
a pure resonance phenomenon, they can be described
by the solution of a linear dynamic system with :I! 7
Fig. 2. Sample record. with filtering as described in the text, degrees of freedom
to illustrate recurring single-effects. A flash at the very begin-
ning is followed at -2 s intervals by a quiet-burst and two M
consecutive noisy-bursts which are superimposed on a con- ~(nAf) = c ,4,,, exp (fi,,uAt) cos (tu,,,nA~ --~CD,,,)
tinuous natural noise level. ,!J ,I
.M
c,,,exp (GJzA~). I < II < 3. (:! 1
= ,,z,,
storm activity. Moreover. they show a distinct recur-
rence behaviour. The time delay between two con- The amplitude il,, and phase cp,,,can be summarized
secutive single-effects was calculated and divided into in a complex amplitude cm, that is related to the excl-
bins of 0.05 s width. The resulting distribution can be tation mechanism, while the damping and frequency
satisfactorily explained by normally distributed ran- are due to the wave propagation conditions in the
dom numbers, except for a strongly enhanced occur- Earth-ionosphere cavity. It is appropriate to the prob-
rence at a time delay of 1.95 s (Fig. 3). Schumann lem to determine these parameters via the Prony alpo-
resonances are not the only consequences of lightning rithm that splits the non-linear problem into twr)
flashes in thunderstorms. Whistlers propagating along linear system of equations, while the non-lineartty 1s
the magnetic field lines can be reflected at the put into the roots of a complex polynomial (Prony.
1795). The first step of this algorithm represents an
autoregressive model

50 recurrence-time
j

which is the equivalent finite difference equation of

the linear dynamic system describing the statistical
dependence of succeeding samples (Kumazawa et tri..
1990). At least M+ 1 boundary conditions arc
required to solve this equation for the autoregressive
2665 effects coefficients u,) a,&,.In general, the Gaussian method
up to 4 s of least-squares is used, yielding the Yule- Walker
class width 0.05 s
r.mean 0.45 s equations in the statistical formulation (Priestly, I98 1)
25t~,,~,,,,,,,,,,,..,~,,,,,,,.,,.,..,,,.,,~
0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0
time delay (s) : p(, Ir, I
Fig. 3. Time delay between two consecutive single-effects, / ; \ = _:il,j. (4)
divided into bins of 0.05 s width. The displayed occurrences /
!Pv I ..I PII Ii at,/1 /
represent running means over a 0.45 s delay time. In the
range shown from 0.85 s to 4 s, those around 2 s dominate.
The most frequently occurring delay is 1.95s. where pi denotes the autocovariance function of lag
482 M. Fiillekrug
k. The maximum-likelihood approach leads to an eig-
envalue problem (Kumazawa et ul., 1990)
where the eigenvalue o& denotes the variance of the
underlying Gaussian noise. The maximization of the
log-likelihood function requires the choice of the smal-
lest eigenvalue and the corresponding autoregressive
model to solve the linear dynamic system. Both possi-
bilities are unsatisfactory from the point of view of
time-series analysis, because the term p0 includes the
variances of the signal and the noise
po = o;+a;t. (6)
In addition, the length of the analysed autocovariance
function is connected with the number of degrees of
freedom which destabilizes the solution even in the
case of oversampled data. The following method of
boundary conditions is convenient for the problem
because it removes the noisy part p0 from the auto-
covariance matrix and leaves free the choice of filter
length M of the underlying autoregressive model. The
first boundary condition is given by a,, = - 1. Building
up the dyadic-product with a distinct choice of bound-
ary values and taking expectations
leads to a noise-free non-quadratic autocovariance
matrix
Solving the overdetermined linear system of equations
in a least-squares sense leads to a noise-free auto-
regressive filter and a robust estimation of the associ-
ated parameters.
7. RESULTS
The derived amplitudes of the Schumann res-
onances show a typical daily variability due to the
smoothed amplitude
2.5
1. resonance
Sqrt(H**Z+D+Q)
0.5 , I , , I , , , , , , , , , , ,
0 4
time tMEZ)s 2o 24
Fig. 4. Variability of the amplitudes of the first resonance
with local time during a single day, derived from sim-
ultaneous records in H and D with the method of boundary
values. The data have been smoothed with a running mean
of 1.25 h width. The amplitude ratio reflects the polarization
of the Schumann-resonance field. For convenience, the
absolute value of the magnetic field is given, representing the
global thunderstorm activity.
polarisation of the electromagnetic field radiated by
lightning strokes. While the H-component at Got-
tingen reflects the thunderstorm activity of Asia and
South America, the D-component shows mainly the
contribution of Africa (Fig. 4). The sum of squared
amplitudes may be summarized in a type of geoelectric
index that is a direct measure of the radiated energy
which characterizes the electromagnetic balance
within the troposphere. The damping and frequency
of the first resonance show a strong dependence on
direction (Figs 5 and 6) due to the anisotropy of
the Earth-ionosphere cavity (Sentman, 1989). The
observed range in frequency is about 300 mHz if H
and D are considered jointly. This agrees with theor-
etical calculations of the shift in frequency (Bliokh et
al., 1980). The daily variability is a highly reproducible
feature, showing a definite dependence on local time.
While the frequency reaches its maximum directional
dependence around local sunrise and sunset, the
difference of the damping in H and D is greatest
around local noon and midnight.
8. CONCLUDING REMARKS
The robust estimation of the amplitude, damping
and frequency of the first two Schumann resonances
allows us to monitor excitation and propagation con-
ditions. These parameters provide globally integrated
 Schumann resonances

0.65 smoothed damping 6.00 smoothed frequency

! 1. resonance
7.95
1. resonance

3.60
G7.90
I
.J
I
CT 7.85
c
'zio.55 0"

E h? 7.60

::
k $
s

7.75
! 0.50 4

7.11.1993
0.45 7.65
4 'Tr-- 24
8tirne ~ME$

Fig. 5 Variabihty of the damping of the first resonance
during a single day. The data have been smoothed with a
running mean of 1.25 h width, showing the strongest direc-
tional dependence around local noon and midnight.
Fig. 6. Variability of the frequency of the tirst resonance
during a single day. The data have been smoothed with 1
running mean of 1.25 h width, showing the strongest dtrec-
tional dependence around local sunrise and sunset due to the
anisotropy of the Earth Ionosphere cavit).

information. modified by a strong daily variability in the troposphere. A second objective is a continuous
depending on local time that can be removed by con- observation of the effects of solar activity coupling
necting the measurements of at least three observation into the lower ionosphere. The improved understand-
sites at mid-latitude locations around the world. One ing of the lower ELF-range will also help to build
of the future objectives of this work is to set up a geo- up magnetotelluric transfer functions. completing the
electric index, characterizing the electromagnetic balance conductivity profile of the Earths upper crust.

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