Abstract Beach erosion phenomena have become increasingly frequent and devastating with serious economic damage on tourism. A relatively recent technique of beach protection nourishment is based the creation along shoreline an unsaturated sandy zone, in which level phreatic surface lowered by means buried drains connected to electric suction pumps. The main problem encountered this solution nee...

Abstract Thunderstorms are the most common source of hazardous weather at local scales, but poorly represented in conventional climate models, resulting high uncertainty future changes. How these changes manifest terms lightning is even more uncertain, with previous studies giving conflicting projections. Here, for first time, we use a km-scale model that explicitly resolves convection across E...

Abstract A description is given of the global atmospheric electric circuit operating between the Earth’s surface and the ionosphere. Attention is drawn to the huge range of horizontal and vertical spatial scales ranging from 10 m to 10m, concerned with the many important processes at work. A similarly enormous range of time scales is involved from 10>s to 10s, in the physical effects and differ...

The ability of climate models to predict extremes is determined by its ability to adequately simulate certain environmental conditions both spatially and temporally. Some of the conditions conducive to the occurrence of extreme weather can be quantified from the convective available potential energy (hereafter referred to as CAPE) and vertical shear of the horizontal wind from 0-6 kilometer (he...

Many observers have reported observations of green light emanating from severe thunderstorms in the midwestern United States. Spectral measurements have demonstrated that the dominant wavelength of the light is in the green portion of the visible spectrum and that this is not just a subjective impression. According to the theory proposed by Bohren and Fraser [Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 74, 2185 (...

Article history: Received 11 December 2007 Accepted 27 March 2008 The global electrical circuit, which maintains a potential of about 280 kV between the earth and the ionosphere, is thought to be driven mainly by thunderstorms and lightning. However, very few in situ measurements of electrical current above thunderstorms have been successfully obtained. In this paper, we present dc to very low ...