Translation and Dissemination Via a Digital Archive/E-Book of the Writings of Heinz Kasemir on Atmospheric Electricity

American Geophysical Union, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

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.