After three days of no sleep (always my most productive time) I fell upon the site www.naturalradiolab.com. I enquired further and found the whole oeuvre fascinating — it was like GCSE Physics but I was not being told what to do by a Paedo who played Dungeons & Dragons.
I returned to the fountain of Wonder (Google) and went about a search. I found that there are Radio Stations hooked up to VLF receivers around the world. Looking on the TuneIn app there are two stations available, on in Italy — but, there was one closer to home, Todmorden. If you search for ‘Live VLF Natural Radio — Todmorden’ you will come across the station using the TuneIn app.
Well, what will you hear? First of all, atmospherics or “sferics” for short. These are the radio waves generated by lightning and sound very much like the radio static you hear when there are thunderstorms in the area. I heared sferics above the background hum of the day to day electrical appliances. ’Tweeks’ are usually heard at night and are spherics that have traveled a long distance and have a resonant “twangy” sound. You can probably hear tweeks on almost any night.
Whistlers are more rare. They originate from lightning and sound like a descending tone or a descending “swoosh” and may last several seconds. Whistlers can occur at any time of day but are most often heard in the pre-dawn hours.
There are many more sounds that are often grouped together under the term “VLF Emissions”, VLF being Very Low Frequency. These sounds originate in the magnetosphere and are the result of disturbances originating from the solar wind and geomagnetic storms. These sounds are most often heard before and for several hours after sunrise, especially during geomagnetic storms.
Why do people listen? For the same reasons we watch whales, the sunset over the ocean, brave the cold to see the Northern Lights, fight the mosquitoes to see a meteor shower and so on. We like to experience the awe and mystery of creation. But there are scientific reasons for these observations also. Before satellites were common, whistlers taught us a great deal about the nature of the ionosphere and the magnetosphere.
As we become more and more dependent on satellites for communication and earth observation, the study of “Space Weather” and the ionosphere and magnetosphere will become increasingly important. As we gain a greater understanding of the earth-sun connection we will realize how activity on the sun can affect weather patterns here on earth. This will be relevant as we study the causes of global warming. We are just beginning to see how the cycles of the sun affect our weather here.