This grant provides support for translation and electronic dissemination (via an American Geophysical Union-hosted publications website) of a group of 58 scientific papers and technical reports comprising over 1000 pages of text & illustrations authored by Dr. Heinz Kasemir, a noted German physicist who later emigrated to the U.S. where he worked within NOAA and was long engaged in fundamental studies of lightning physics. Among key findings represented in his body of work, which has until now not been readily accessible, around 1950 Dr. Kasemir advanced the notion that lighting develops as a bi-directional leader with zero net charge--a concept that was not fully appreciated in the broader community until many decades later. Kasemir's detailed and ground-breaking analysis of lightning channels, which established key relationships between electric fields and charge development in upward-directed leaders, are viewed as representing a heretofore missing link in proper understanding of the lightning process. This and other aspects of his work will be highlighted in an introduction and commentary on selected papers, which will serve to place this work in the context of modern lighting research.
The Intellectual Merit of this activity derives from efforts to more comprehensively describe the physics of lightning channel development and propagation. Broader Impacts of this effort will come through the preservation and greatly improved access to a large body of scientific work in the area of atmospheric electricity research.
Overview This project is a collection of papers and presentations of Heinz-Wolfram Kasemir, a pioneer in the field of atmospheric electricity. Kasemir’s ideas were far ahead of their time, so until now many of his publications, including some early papers written in German, were not easily accessible to researchers currently pursuing a better understanding of atmospheric electricity, in particular lightning physics. Intellectual Merit Many of the physical concepts presented by Kasemir in his manuscripts contradicted the prevailing interpretations of that time. Because of this, and not surprisingly, most of the papers Kasemir submitted to peer-reviewed publications in the United States or presented serious difficulties for reviewers, and most were rejected by these journals. In point of fact, either most reviewers’ abilities were not equal to understanding the new theories developed by Kasemir, or the reviewers were biased toward the prevalent interpretations. Facing constant frustrating and exhausting fights for acceptance of his papers by scientific journals, Kasemir gave up his attempts to publish in peer-reviewed journals. Most of Kasemir’s publications were therefore found either in technical reports or in the proceedings of scientific conferences, which made them difficult or impossible to access. Prior to Kasemir’s work on atmospheric electricity, the principles of electrostatics were applied to electric fields from charges in clouds. Kasemir, in a series of publications with the theme "theory of atmospheric current flows," addressed the influence of air conductivity on current flow in the atmosphere, e.g., the exponential increase of conductivity with altitude. He treated, in a vigorous theoretical form, the transition in time from the electrostatic to the electrodynamic state for slowly varying processes. Applications of Kasemir’s theories were many: (1) calculating the efficiency of cloud charges flowing to very high altitudes into the global circuit, (2) deriving the time it takes for charges of lightning to leak upward rather than to the ground, (3) explaining the effect of conductivity changes at cloud boundaries on screening charges, and (4) development of measurement techniques to separate conduction from displacement currents, just to mention a few. Equally revolutionary were ideas proposed by Kasemir on lightning physics. His idea that lightning develops as a bidirectional leader with a zero-net charge, proposed in 1950, did not receive recognition in the lightning research community until the late 1980s. This idea, which became critical to the understanding of lightning physics, was finally confirmed during in situ measurements of lightning strikes to aircraft in thunderstorms during the 1980s. Kasemir’s fundamental analysis of influence charges on lightning channels in a potential field opened the subject area of physical modeling of lightning processes and established the relationship between electric fields and charge development on upward leaders. This relationship is essential for understanding the lightning processes involved. Researchers on lightning would do well to study in depth Kasemir’s theoretical papers. Project Outcomes The collection was created by Vladislav Mazur and Lothar H. Ruhnke and is hosted by the American Geophysical Union; it consists of 58 papers and technical reports by Heniz Kasemir, including 12 that were published in German and that have been translated into English. The collection editors have provided an introduction to the collection of papers and added commentary to some papers in order to place them in the context of current lightning research. Heinz Kasemir was always willing to share his experience and ideas with anyone willing to listen. It would be a huge loss to the atmospheric electricity community for most of Kasemir’s scientific legacy to remain unavailable. Because many of his papers were not reviewed by his peers, it is a rare opportunity to experience the real thinking of a prominent scientist in the field of atmospheric electricity. Kasemir’s papers are not easy reading, but a persistent reader will find great pleasure to discover in them clear ideas expressed in very precise language.
