Subject: Brazilian lightning & electrical grid
From: "Bill Howell. Retired from NRCan. now in Alberta Canada" <>
Date: Tue, 26 May 2015 10:05:24 -0600
To: "Marley Vellasco. INNS BoG. Head of E-Eng Dept. PUC-Rio. Rio de Janiero. Brazil" <>
Cc:

Marley -  I met Rogerio last night at a Southern Alberta IEEE Power & Energy Society session on "Project Electrical Best Practices", and mentioned "Smart Grid" (eg Kumar Venayagamoorthy ClemsonU) then 100 M lightening strikes per year in Brazil.  He was surprised with that number, then explained that he was Brazilian, and designed a laboratory for lightning investigations for CEDEL (or ?CEREL? - the Brazilian equivalent of USA-EPRI).  Moreover, his high voltage power engineering consulting in Calgary, Alberta, deals with with geomagnetic effects on high voltage systems. 

I mentioned your recent paper, and showed him the first page on my laptop.  He is quite interested in looking at your paper, but I won't forward unpublished papers, so if and when you are able, please forward a copy to him.

Cardoso, Silva, Vellasco, Cataldo 08Aug2015 "Quantum-inspired features and parameter optimization of Spiking Neural Networks for a case study from Atmospheric Discharges" INNS Big Data conference, San Francisco, 08-10Aug2015


Rogerio
-  Just a couple of quick comments :
  • [Earth-internal, solar] signatures of geomagnetics - David ?Botelers? geomagnetics research group in Ottawa kept mentioning the short-term solar signature of geomagnetics, versus the long-term ?Earth-internal? (core dynamo) signature. But when I looked very briefly at the data, it looked like a solar signature at all time-scales to several hundred years, and I suspect the same for glaciation-scale as well but I haven't looked at that (eg Earth magnetic pole flips on a variable timescale of perhaps thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions of years, versus the sunspot half-cycle flips of the suns magnetic poles every 11 years).
  • Dynamo theory of geomagnetism - Furthermore, it seems to me (based on comments from others) that there is something fishy about the standard "dynamo" theory for geomagnetics (perhaps the sun as well), as a moving conductor does not generate a magnetic field. It is almost the other way around -> an electrical current generates a magnetic field. A moving magnet does generate electrical current in a conductor - but I question whether Earth outer core temperatures and pressures yield liquid-state ferromagnetism (maybe I'm wrong). An alternative theory I heard in a presentation ~20 years ago from "James Kelly? (at the time an emeritus Cambridge professor), was that iron minerals at the outer core temperatures and pressures would be solid "extreme Poisson ratio" materials possibly with ferromagnetic properties. He wasn't sure - but had not been able to engage geologists in a discussion about an alternative theory (this sounds SOOO familiar!). I don't know whether his idea is reasonable or not - which is what makes it fun.
  • Pipeline corrosion - Winston Reevie's (retired several years ago) group at an NRCan, across the street from the lab I worked at in Ottawa, did work on geomagnetic-accelerated pipeline corrosion - if I remember correctly perhaps amplified where biocorrosion is a problem.
  • Intense Forbush geomagnetic events and human [health, behaviour] - I can't find the paper that I referred to last night, regarding increased Moscow isechemic heart events (?+6 to 12%?), [traffic, industrial] accidents (?+15 to 20%?) during intense ?Forbush? geomagnetic events, which was given to me by a female scientist in David ?Boteler's? group (I can't remember her name). As I said, I still wonder if one of the industrial accidents was Tchernobyl. My "Recoll" software for full text indexing of my hard drive is currently messed up, but I may only have it in paper form in a box somewhere.
Russian scientist ?Avakyan? also contacted me ~10 years ago about similar work he would have liked to pursue (depending on funding), but also mixed in with investigations into strong Earth surface "microwave showers" he speculated were caused by intense solar events declenching emissions from Rydberg electrons dropping quantum states in the upper atmosphere. Anyways, here are a few references on the same topic that I have received from various people :
    • Elyahu Stoupel, Elchin S. Babayev, Peter N. Shustarev, Evgeny Abramson, Peter Israelevich and Jacqueline Sulkes 2009 “Traffic accidents and environmental physical activity” International Journal of Biometeorology , Volume 53, Number 6 (2009), 523-534, DOI: 10.1007/s00484-009-0240-5
    • Sergei V. Avakyan 2006 "Microwave ionospheric emission as a new factor of solar-biosphere relations" Proceeding of 4th International Workshop on Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields 16-20 October 2006, Crete, Greece, October 2006, V. II, p.p. 1315-1322. (I have this paper if you are interested)
    • Ali R. Allahverdiyev, Elchin S. Babayev, Elchin N. Khalilov, Naila N. Gahramanova ?date?
      ”Possible space weather influence on functional Activity of the human brain” http://www.iac.es/adjuntos/prensa/Space%20Weather%20Effects%20on%20Health.pdf

Contacts :
Marley Vellasco. INNS BoG. Head of E-Eng Dept. PUC-Rio. Rio de Janiero. Brazil <>   http://www.ica.ele.puc-rio.br/marley/
Rogerio Verdolin. President & Principal Engr. Verdolin Solutions. Calgary. Canada <> 1-403-764-9105    http://www.verdolinsolutions.com/
If either of you decide to copy me on emails, keep it in Portuguese -> I'll try Google Translate, and failing that, look for a Portuguese interpreter.


Mr. Bill Howell
1-587-707-2027     www.BillHowell.ca
P.O. Box 299, Hussar, Alberta, T0J1S0
Retired: Science Research Manager (SE-REM-01) of Natural Resources Canada, CanmetMINING, Ottawa
IJCNN2015 Killarney Ireland, Publicity co-Chair, Program Committee member www.ijcnn.org
INNS BigData2015 San Francisco, Publicity Co-Chair  http://innsbigdata.org
IJCNN2014 Beijing, Technical Program Committee, http://www.ieee-wcci2014.org