 So, what excites me about this project is that it's a little bit out of the box. It's an area of research that a lot of people have worked on for a long time, and people have produced a variety of different types of results based on observations. But there aren't well-established physical mechanisms to explain some of these observations. And so, another aspect of this project that excites me is that it's so interdisciplinary, and that we've had to gather a group of scientists together that come from very different areas of atmospheric and space research to work together in a way that they probably wouldn't have dreamed of before. And so, we have people who work on the behavior of clouds, lightning, but we also have space physicists working on the interaction between the solar wind and the magnetosphere and the ionosphere. And not only that, but we cross disciplinary boundaries in that we have to work with electromagnetism, we have to work with chemistry, we have to work with other aspects of science that are usually not combined together into one project, and so that's part of what makes it interesting to me. To understand electricity, you really have to understand what atoms are made out of. They consist of a nucleus that has a neutral charge and positively charged particles. And around that nucleus, you have electrons, negatively charged particles that are orbiting around it. Now, if you are rubbing, for example, like when you're rubbing your hands, you are giving these electrons that are going around the nucleus of an atom energy to leave its orbit. You take them out of that structure and make them mobile. And it's really the flow of these electrons that produce electricity. So the atmosphere is largely neutral. So you need some energy somehow to break that, the electrons, and away from the neutral atom or molecule. And the way the ionosphere is formed is largely through the extreme ultraviolet radiation coming from the sun. That provides the energy by which you can separate electrons from the atom and they become free electrons. That atom now becomes positively charged, which is an ion, and that makes up the charged part of the ionosphere largely from the solar. As we get deeper into the atmosphere, that radiation gets absorbed by the upper part of the atmosphere and doesn't reach the surface. You need more energetic particles to further ionize the atmosphere as you get closer to the surface. That's partly brought on by galactic cosmic rays. They have very high energies that can get through the atmosphere and in that path have a lot of energy, collide with natural particles and create ionization that way. There's also energetic particles from the magnetosphere that come in and they also create collisions and create rad ions in the lower atmosphere. And then finally at the surface you have radioactive decay when one outcome is radon. And that radon will come up and emanate from the surface and create charged particles. So the distribution from the surface all the way to the edge of space is variable. But it's this distribution that is so challenging because there's chemistry and there's physical pathways and there's external sources and forces that make it very difficult for us to account for it all. But we know those ions constitute the conductivity of the atmosphere. So my role in this project is modeling ionospheric electric fields and currents and helping develop the model of the global electrical circuit from the ground up through the ionosphere and connecting the ionospheric component with the lower atmospheric component. I think it's always exciting to get into a field of research where there are many unknowns. So we do understand or at least we think we understand the ionospheric electric fields and currents, the basic elements of it, although there's still many aspects that we do not know how to model fully. Much less well known is the lower atmospheric component of the electrical circuit. And I think in this project we're going to almost inevitably discover new features which are going to teach us things about atmospheric electricity and possible connections to atmospheric processes. So we're looking at the role of thunderstorms in electrified clouds in the global electric circuit. So a cloud doesn't have to actually be producing lightning to be electrified. And there's what we call a Wilson current that generally runs from the top of the cloud into the ionosphere and helps feed the global electric circuit. So in the typical thunderstorm setup is a source of charge. In the reverse setup where the opposite polarity is generally a sink. So we're hoping to find some parameters of thunderstorms like we're looking at the speed of the updraft and how much ice is in there. We're hoping we can relate that to how strong or weak the current is. I'm from Penn State University and Communications and Space Science Laboratory. In that lab for the last 10 years we have been very actively engaged in the development of theoretical understanding of transient luminous events in the Earth's atmosphere. So we work on a variety of subjects related to lightning and lightning behavior, lightning physics and of course in the context of global electric circuit modeling. We want to quantify how much lightning contributes to the global electric circuit, for example in comparison to this. Electrified under clouds and electrified clouds. There is a significant controversy in existing literature as to how much lightning contributes. So in some cases some scientists actually claim 40% of the total current which is following the global electric circuit is contributed by lightning so we won't actually understand and quantify actual amounts. Those are very complex questions. We first have to understand basics which is what we are doing in order to see what other impacts it has. So our first goal is really to understand all the components of the global electric circuit. All the components of the electrical processes that are going on in the atmosphere and then build on that.