Signal and Noise
A search for meaning in the unknown.
At first many things appear as a noise to us, until we deliberately search for meaning in the patterns.
There are two articles describing magnetic activities during isolated thunderstorms occured in California in 1990 and 1999. The author is highly cited Dr. Anthony Fraser-Smith.
The image shows a diurnal variation of magnetic activities at different frequencies. They are called sferics which are “echoes” of lightnings occuring around the globe. There are thousands of lightning are occuring at any time. It is considered a background noise as one cannot discern any useful signal out of it for the moment. However, Fraser-Smith showed that thunderstorms occurring nearby can cause the increase in magnetic activity two or 50 times depending on the bandwidth (from 0.01Hz to 10Hz) we are looking at.
There is a pattern in the background noise in the graph. We can see two distinct features at 21 and 22 days (decrease in magnetic activity in red and distinct signal in blue, respectively) prior to the thunderstorm occurred on 23 September 1990. It could be due to a large-scale movements of ungulates. Unfortunately, no data available from the Bureau of Land Management about horse roundups on those days. No attribution can be made.
There was another isolated thunderstorm event on 9 September 1999, however the data is not complete so we cannot confirm the 21–22 day pattern. I would like to believe that there should be the same pattern before 21 and 22 days to the thunderstorm itself. Unfortunately, the author of these articles is retired now (I contacted him).
Reality doesn’t care about what we believe, it does what it does. So, similar measurements could be done to confirm or not the hypothesis.
Since we are pattern seeking machines we try to explain it by throwing a hypothesis to test. We do proposals and if we are eligible enough, a scholarship may be awarded to do studies. So, it will take years, but given circumstances we have very limited time.
Some generous enough scientist could say “oh, there could be something there, let’s test it together”, but it is not happening yet.
What needs to happen for measurements to be made?
Magnetic activity measurements of thunderstorms in deserts could be a work worth doing if one has resources to do rainmaking tests.
