Whistlers in Summer and Winter
Joachim Köppen Kiel 2018
The best chance of listening to whistlers is in summer, as local thunderstorms provide
plenty of lightnings, whose numerous and strong spherics make a lot of noise. They also can
be the sources for whistlers, which obviously are of the two hop variety: it takes
about 1.2 sec to fall from 5 to 2 kHz, and any strong spherics emission about 2.5 sec before
the whistler appears at 5 kHz would be the source (marked by the arrow) in this recording
from Aug. 24th, 2008:
Whistlers can also appear in winter: on March 3rd, 2009 many whistlers
were recorded like these three. They take only 0.6 sec to fall from 5 to 2 kHz, hence
they are one hop whistlers, greetings from southern Africa. In winter Europe doesn't
have thunderstorms. Thus the background noise is low, with only a few spherics, probably
from northern Africa or the Near East:
When we put the two data sets together, using the same time scaling, the difference
in the duration of the whistlers becomes more obvious:
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last update: Apr 2018 J.Köppen
listen to the sound file
listen to the sound file