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Measurements of Atmospheric Electricity Aloft

This paper is a partially a review of atmospheric electricity phenomena, uniquely concentrating on measurements above Earth’s surface (from kite, balloon, rocket and aircraft measurements). However, the paper is much more than a review of past literature because it contains many insights not previously published by bringing together disparate techniques and observations extending over many orders in magnitude of the electrical quantities and over unprecedented intervals. The paper also highlights, for the first time, in-cloud electrical changes associated with space weather events. This paper was commissioned by the journal editor after he had acted as external examiner for the PhD thesis (University of Reading, 2010) of the author (Nicoll, now a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow with the Unit) and was submitted one year later. The invitation was to extend her PhD work on fair-weather electrification to thunderstorm conditions and to publish the discussion of cloud charge properties in relation to space weather phenomena for the first time.