How can I adequately thank everyone who has made the past five years the most fun period of my life? I truly could not have asked for a better advisor. Umran has been open, thoughtful, understanding, accessible, patient, and unendingly enthusiastic, besides his intellectual talents.
I have had especially rich interactions with Mark Stanley. Data taken while working together at Langmuir Laboratory, as well as Mark's own measurements analyzed collaboratively, form a major part of the work in this dissertation. In addition, Mark's knowledge of lightning and thunderstorm processes were very valuable to me, and we have enjoyed many sprite-related discussions.
I am very grateful to Victor Pasko for his exceptionally wide-open door and for the many exciting and illuminating discussions I've had with him. It has been a great privilege to be working so close to the preeminent theorist in our field, and many of the ideas presented in this work follow from Victor's research and what I have learned from him.
I would like to extend thanks to another coauthor, Steve Cummer, for his help with ELF current determination, for insightful discussions, for taking me mountain biking, and just for his outstanding contributions to this field. I am also grateful to Martin Füllekrug for sharing his superb ULF data, and for useful (email) conversations. Steve Reising has also extended valuable advice to me on numerous occasions, for which I am very grateful.
My thanks and respect go out to Jack Winckler at the University of Minnesota for his visit and consultation in designing the Fly's Eye. Rick Rairden has been consistently generous and outgoing in helping our efforts. He provided the camera each year of the Fly's Eye operation, as well as a calibrated light source on more than one occasion. Gary Swenson and Stephen Mende also both contributed to the Fly's Eye experiment through helpful discussion.
Ken Cummins of Global Atmospherics Inc. provided NLDN data, and the Astronomical Data Center's stellar database was used for interpreting star fields. Also, I am indebted to the Langmuir Laboratory for excellent support and the use of their facilities.
Elizabeth Gerken fielded the telescopic imager, and operated the Fly's Eye during observations on 6 August 1998. I am indebted to Sean Hansen for his outstanding diligence in operation of the juvenile Fly's Eye during the summer of 1996.
Working in a group with such a rich history in magnetospheric physics has been a joy. Inspiring and fascinating discussions with Don Carpenter, Bob Helliwell, Bill Trabucco, and many others from the group will remain strong in my memory. I am grateful for help from Jerry Yarbrough and from many of the students with whom I have overlapped in the VLF group, and for the support of many others in the community. I would also like to thank Martin Walt and Seb Doniach for kindly serving on my reading committee.
The logistical support of Shao Lan Min and Paula Perron have each been invaluable, and I have greatly appreciated their invariant efficiency and friendliness.
I would like to thank Peter Dourmashkin for inspiring, investing in, and believing in me during my first year at M.I.T., and to Al Lazarus, Karolen Paularena, and the many dedicated teachers I had there for their help and love of physics and teaching.
I left Stanford on two occasions for highly enriching summer schools. For my time in Vienna I am indebted to the Canadian Foundation for the International Space University and all the inspired teachers and administrators at I.S.U., and for my time in Greenbelt I am grateful to NASA and especially Steve Zalesak at GSFC.
In addition, my two trips to Antarctica were each fun and beautiful beyond my expectation and dreams and I consider myself to have been superlatively fortunate in all the field work I have been able to undertake. I shall always remember seeing my first naked-eye sprite on 27 July, 1997. My scientific curiosity has long been founded in such natural beauty.
I have enjoyed constant love and support from Esther Mecking, my sister Rosalind, my mother Iris, my father John, and my brothers Robert and Stephen. My family has been my biggest gift in life. Esther has my special gratitude for encouraging me to eat and sleep regularly, and exercise occasionally, during the six weeks prior to my defence.
I am most grateful to all my friends from the Stanford Outdoor Education Program and elsewhere who have helped to make my life whole and to keep me cognizant of the other two of Edward Teller's three questions. The wilds of California have been a constant inspiration; I am grateful to all those who have helped to preserve pieces of them.
This dissertation was brought to you by Matlab, Adobe Illustrator, and software that was built to work rather than to make money - LATEX, Emacs, NoWeb, and Gnu's compiler for C++.
This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research under grant N00014-94-1-0100 and AASERT grant N00014-95-1-1095 and by the National Science Foundation under grant ATM-9731170.