Radio atmospheric the Earth's surface and the ionospheric D- and E- layers. Whistlers generated by lightning strokes can propagate into the magnetosphere along the geomagnetic lines of force. Finally, upper-atmospheric lightning or sprites, that occur at mesospheric altitudes, are short-lived electric breakdown phenomena, probably generated by giant lightning events on the ground. In a typical cloud-to-ground stroke (R stroke), negative electric charge (electrons) of the order of Q = 1 C stored within the lightning channel is lowered to the ground within a typical impulse time interval of τ = 100 μs. This corresponds to an average current flowing within the channel
Atmospheric wave scale Rossby waves gives rise to sudden stratospheric warmings and the deposition by gravity waves gives rise to the quasi-biennial oscillation. In the mathematical description of atmospheric waves, spherical harmonics are used. When considering a section of a wave along a latitude circle, this is equivalent to a sinusoidal shape. Because the propagation of the wave is fundamentally caused by an imbalance of the forces acting on the air (which is often thought of in terms of air parcels when considering wave motion), the types of waves and their propagation characteristics vary latitudinally, principally because the Coriolis effect on horizontal