https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/848666/what-is-induced-atmospheric-vibration Skip to main content Stack Exchange Network Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. Visit Stack Exchange [ ] Loading... 1. + Tour Start here for a quick overview of the site + Help Center Detailed answers to any questions you might have + Meta Discuss the workings and policies of this site + About Us Learn more about Stack Overflow the company, and our products 2. 3. current community + Physics help chat + Physics Meta your communities Sign up or log in to customize your list. more stack exchange communities company blog 4. 5. Log in 6. Sign up Physics 1. 1. Home 2. Questions 3. Unanswered 4. Tags 5. 6. Chat 7. Users 8. 2. Teams [teams-promo] Ask questions, find answers and collaborate at work with Stack Overflow for Teams. Try Teams for free Explore Teams 3. Teams 4. Ask questions, find answers and collaborate at work with Stack Overflow for Teams. Explore Teams Teams Q&A for work Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. Learn more about Teams What is "Induced Atmospheric Vibration"? Ask Question Asked 2 days ago Modified yesterday Viewed 33k times 56 $\begingroup$ The blackout seen today on the Iberian Peninsula has been attributed to a "rare" phenomenon known as "induced atmospheric vibration" It says that "due to extreme temperature variations in the interior or Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 KV), a phenomenon known as 'induced atmospheric vibration'". "These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network." Unfortunatly, I am unable to find any paper or article explaining this effect. What is it? * electricity * atmospheric-science * vibrations Share Cite Improve this question Follow asked 2 days ago tobalt's user avatar tobalttobalt 2,28311 gold badge88 silver badges1717 bronze badges $\endgroup$ 5 * 2 $\begingroup$ Those vibrations are a real thing but I'm not aware that they can cause the electrical frequency fluctuations blamed for the disconnects, unless cables break, which has not been reported in this incident, thus far. The same source blamed frequency differences on temperature differences across the peninsula, resulting in different conductivities. YMMV on that too. $\endgroup$ - got trolled too much this week Commented 2 days ago * 2 $\begingroup$ It's likely a cascade. The high temperature expands, stretches and distorts the cables (out of round), local heating creates 'thermals' (moving air pockets), the cable dance/ gallop and touch. Short term interruption either trips a circuit, the load causes 'slowing' of the generators ('loss of frequency') or the transient short confuses a frequency monitor, and then more circuits are tripped off because of the low frequency (when low frequency the transformers saturate V/f with high peak currents) so more circuits trip. Boom; Iberia switched off! $\ endgroup$ - Philip Oakley Commented yesterday * $\begingroup$ Those vibrations in the first video has nothing to do with temperature gradients: first onw was icicles and the other one wind!? $\endgroup$ - sandos Commented yesterday * 3 $\begingroup$ The grid is poorly designed and they are trying to buzzword their way out of admitting it. They have not only said "induced atmospheric vibration" but "synchronous elements" that didn't synchronize and "inertia" that didn't "inertiaize" or did inertiaize, however you would have it. It's all intended to mislead the public. $\endgroup$ - Wastrel Commented yesterday * 3 $\begingroup$ @Wastrel You aren't proving it's deception. Generators will take themselves off the grid for even small errors in synchronization because there isn't much wiggle room before it will do damage to the equipment. That doesn't mean it wasn't poorly designed equipment that caused the synchronization error. $\endgroup$ - Loren Pechtel Commented 18 hours ago Add a comment | 7 Answers 7 Sorted by: Reset to default [Highest score (default) ] 45 $\begingroup$ Anyone who's had to build a power system rapidly learns that electricity is not as simple as "electrons move, work gets done". Real electrical systems have to deal with issues of reactance and other exciting math-heavy constructs designed to drive you into some other field of study. Power Grids experience this on an epic scale. They have to concern themselves with a few needs simultaneously: * ensuring electrical potential doesn't sag under load (maintaining voltage) * ensuring the integrity of the AC waveform (maintaining frequency) * ensuring the system doesn't lose too much energy to fighting its own electromagnetic behavior (controlling the power factor) That last one is the part that is profoundly nonintuitive. Capacitance and inductance inherent to the system create a sort of inertia in the system that must be fought to provide those other two guarantees. Together they work to create what's called "reactance". Long range lines and the equipment they connect to can have a lot of reactance. High voltages make it even weirder. One of the strange things that you don't experience at lower voltages is "corona discharge". Very high electrical potentials cause the air around the conductors to become ionized. When sufficiently ionized, this creates discharges. You can see static examples of this natural phenomenon in the form of "Saint Elmo's Fire". This often precedes a lightning strike if the potential difference is extreme enough. But power transmission systems are not static. They fluctuate dynamically with the AC waveform. This causes situations where discharges or perturbation in fields that create them act as a new component of the reactance of the system. Modeling this is very complicated and very important. Real power transmission systems have active components that work to provide the above guarantees. Most of the time, they are modeled well and tune things to keep the voltage and frequency where it should be with a minimum of losses due to reactance. But these corona discharges are unlike the other two components of reactance, because they are affected by the environment outside of the system. Consider... what affects the voltages at which ionized air molecules might cause a dishcarge? Temperature and humidity do. And now we finally reach the part where "induced atomospheric vibrations" starts to make sense. When things get hotter or drier, discharges happen more readily. And when they happen, they tend to happen at a given frequency. When that happens, the active components of the transmission system try to reduce the reactance; but they can't. They aren't built to deal with this kind of reactance and the models that drive them make incorrect assumptions (e.g. some increase in capacitance means we need to adjust the phase angle). This would work fine in a system without these discharges. With the discharges, it's ineffective. And, since both ends of the connection may be actively doing things that make the problem worse, they can get themselves so far out of sync that they're basically burning power competing with each other (instead of working together like normal). This is what took down the grid. Unexpected components of reactance appeared due to corona discharges because of atmospheric conditions. From there, automatic safeguards designed to keep the grid in sync were ineffective or even counterproductive. The grid decohered and everything shut down as safeguards tripped in a cascade. As the grid gets more modern, it also exacerbates these problems. When big spinning generators were driving the grid, they could only act so fast. This created a kind of inertia that damped oscillations created by responses to these issues. With inverter-based power storage, generation, and transmission, the grid can now react incredibly quickly. This is good when they do the right thing, but can be very bad when they do the wrong thing. As the weather grows hotter, the grid also sees more of these previously unusual conditions, too. Today they formed a kind of "perfect storm". In the future, we will likely see this more often until they find ways to counteract, mitigate, or model these issues. You can read more about this phenomenon here: https:// electrical-engineering-portal.com/ 7-bad-effects-corona-transmission-lines Share Cite Improve this answer Follow answered yesterday Jayson's user avatar JaysonJayson 39111 silver badge44 bronze badges New contributor Jayson is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering. Check out our Code of Conduct. $\endgroup$ 11 * $\begingroup$ Interesting writeup, thanks. Re your point about modern systems reacting quickly, that's only a software patch to emulate inertia... Why hasn't it been done? $\endgroup$ - Basic Commented yesterday * 3 $\begingroup$ dryer air conducts less. And the energy loss due to coronas is super minuscule and not several GW. And it's actually hard to change the frequency of an AC grid, unless there is inbalance between supply and demand. So this would have required a single region to suddenly, within seconds, lose GW scale to corona discharges and consequently trip the transmission lines into overload shutdown in a cascading way. And I don't see coronas doing this at this scale. $\endgroup$ - tobalt Commented yesterday * 2 $\begingroup$ @Basic If you do inertia in software, you need spare power. Now imagine your precious solar array running at 2/3 of its available power, just in case. Good for the system, but expensive. Now imagine that a spinning generator can supply, by its inertia alone, few times its rated power. The grid has to adapt to both new power sources and the new behavior of the power consumers. $\endgroup$ - fraxinus Commented yesterday * $\begingroup$ Do wind-induced oscillations of the cables also have an impact? I expect oscillating cables to generate some energy by interacting with the Earth's magnetic field. I'm curious if that can have a significant effect on the voltage & power factor. $\endgroup$ - PM 2Ring Commented yesterday * 2 $\begingroup$ While you may be discussing real phenomena, they probably haven't notably contributed to this incident. The original claim of atmospheric phenomena playing a role has been withdrawn. $\endgroup$ - tobalt Commented yesterday | Show 6 more comments 7 $\begingroup$ And you won't find it: either it's an erroneous translation into English, or the politician didn't understand the technical explanations given to him. Weather changes can lead to uneven load - somewhere the heating is turned on en masse, and somewhere - air conditioning. Therefore, the frequency of local generators can begin to decrease, but in unified electrical networks ALL generators must rotate strictly synchronously! And, in order to avoid catastrophic current pulsations, the automatic frequency unloading protection is activated, which disconnects the problematic section. The load is distributed to other generators and the problem can be committed by another generator. It is important that before this, the line feeding Spain from France was disconnected - which could compensate for the lack of generated power and stabilize the situation. The result is load fluctuations caused by segment shutdowns and a complete collapse of the network. Share Cite Improve this answer Follow edited yesterday answered yesterday OldAlex's user avatar OldAlexOldAlex 9433 bronze badges New contributor OldAlex is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering. Check out our Code of Conduct. $\endgroup$ 2 * 1 $\begingroup$ They have since backpaddled on their claim of atmospheric phenomena being responsible or linked to the blackout. So that fact, together with that term not being properly defined/known in the first place, let's me conclude that it is indeed not a real thing. The other answers, which do explain some interaction between HV lines and the surrounding air (not the atmosphere though) are thus not relevant for the origin of this incident. $\endgroup$ - tobalt Commented yesterday * 3 $\begingroup$ @tobalt It's not at all unusual for there to be several theories of what happened in an outage like this, that get refined or discarded as new information comes in. The engineers responsible for the system don't get a nice printout that says "the system exploded for this reason". They have a huge amount of telemetry, some of which is anomalous, some of which isn't, some of which is probably involved in what happened, some of which probably isn't (but it's very difficult to be sure of that). Investigations take time. $\endgroup$ - Cadence Commented 15 hours ago Add a comment | 4 $\begingroup$ I don't have an answer, but I've found a detailed paper entitled " Atmospheric resonances and their coupling to vibrations of the ground and waves in the ocean" It's not the answer to your question, but there appears to be some clues in there, where it's discussing different atmospheric resonant types, and quiet a few links to reference materials. It's at the very least, the start of a rabbit trail, that I think will lead to the answer. I've only started my investigations, as I too have never heard of this, and am quite intrigued as to how this triggered a blackout of this magnatitude Edit: Found an entire paper on how to deal with oscillation problems in inter connected grids. Oscillations can result when the control settings of the automatic generation control (AGC) (or possibly multiple AGCs) are incompatible with the primary frequency response of resources in the subject systems. The risk of this type of miscoordination increases with the rise of IBRs and the more dramatic diurnal and weather-driven swings in dispatches, flows, and resource mixes. Diagnosis and Mitigation of Observed Oscillations in IBR-Dominant Power Systems A PRACTICAL GUIDE The paper has much more insight, but as I understand it, the power generators are sync'd together at very precise frequencies, and the infrasound waves generated by heat variance caused the power lines to oscillate in a way that caused the power generators to go out of sync with each other. It's much more complex than that, but I believe that this is the gist of what the atmospheric induced vibrations are that they are referencing. Share Cite Improve this answer Follow edited 2 days ago answered 2 days ago kettlewell's user avatar kettlewellkettlewell 5722 bronze badges New contributor kettlewell is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering. Check out our Code of Conduct. $\endgroup$ 2 * $\begingroup$ Those are different kinds of oscillations. The cables oscillating due to wind won't usually cause electrical frequency oscillations. This answer is almost cargo cult. The one case when they are connected is wind-generated electricity ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4218656, but I'm not sure that can be blamed in this incident. $\endgroup$ - got trolled too much this week Commented yesterday * $\begingroup$ IMO you are stating two unrelated things. Wind resonances in mHz range and that generators can only all generate when in sync. But I'm lacking a connection between wind and transmission lines leaking power or losing connection. If it was just wind breaking lines, they'd just have said 'wind', and not used this highly specific terminology. $\endgroup$ - tobalt Commented yesterday Add a comment | 4 $\begingroup$ The UK Guardian cites experts: https://www.theguardian.com/business/ 2025/apr/28/ spain-and-portugal-power-outage-cause-cyber-attack-electricity "Due to the variation of the temperature, the parameters of the conductor change slightly," said Taco Engelaar, managing director at Neara, a software provider to energy utilities. "It creates an imbalance in the frequency." Georg Zachmann, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels thinktank, saidthe system had suffered "cascading disconnections of power plants" - including one in France - when the frequency of the grid dropped below the European standard of 50Hz. The HV lines have capacitance, inductance and resistance. Resistance changes with temperature, so does capacitance. So the impedance of the HV lines changes slightly as function of temperature (Impedance Z = square root ( inductance / capacitance). However: how the (slightly) changing impedance of the HV lines would influence the frequency of the current they remains a mystery to me. But th change in impedance could lead to impedance mismatch and thus to standing waves on the HV lines which would cause higher than expected voltages at certain locations in the HV lines. Share Cite Improve this answer Follow answered yesterday Gerd's user avatar GerdGerd 4111 bronze badge New contributor Gerd is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering. Check out our Code of Conduct. $\endgroup$ Add a comment | 2 $\begingroup$ Humidity and temperature indeed could lead to increased corona and then to discharge, secondly line capacitance and inductance changes. Single discharge or a train of discharges could lead to creation of standing waves in long transmission line. Share Cite Improve this answer Follow answered yesterday Wojciech's user avatar WojciechWojciech 2111 bronze badge New contributor Wojciech is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering. Check out our Code of Conduct. $\endgroup$ 1 * 1 $\begingroup$ Another aspect is grid instability due to increased inverter sources and quick controllers. PV and wind sources are not elastic. Just before black out Spain has been powered by wind and solar in 78%. There was not enough traditional synchronous "spinning reserve". $\endgroup$ - Wojciech Commented yesterday Add a comment | -1 $\begingroup$ This is a really interesting phenomenon and point, and I'm not a scientist myself, but based on what everyone's said--and just thinking through it--I think the main issue seems to be, well, environmental conditions messing with the expected electrical behaviour in the system. Like, to put it super simply (even though it's obviously more complicated), it's as if the atmosphere outside the cable is creating a kind of potential imbalance with what's going on inside the cable. And while these high-voltage systems usually do have models and safeguards to compensate for that kind of thing, the problem is when those models don't include edge-case conditions--like a sudden, unusually dry period that no one really saw coming or planned for. If you remember, just a month ago, the Iberian Peninsula had tons of rain--like one of the wettest months of the year. So the models might've still been tuned to that moisture-rich environment. But now it's suddenly very, very dry, and that dry air increases the likelihood of static discharge. And this is where things like corona discharge come in. So--again, this is a simplified way to think about it--but voltage and current inside the cable can kind of be thought of like pressurised water. And if the insulation and environmental parameters aren't behaving as expected, that pressure can escape in the form of discharge into the surrounding air. That's essentially what corona discharge is: it's when the electric field around a high-voltage conductor becomes strong enough to ionise the air around it, leading to current "leaking" into the atmosphere--not in a useful or controlled way, but as waste or interference. It's not always dangerous in small amounts, but it is a sign that something's not optimal. So, if this kind of leakage was happening: * It could've dropped the voltage or current levels in one part of the grid * That drop might've triggered a safety response--a trip--in that segment * But if the response wasn't fast or effective enough, that trip could cause an imbalance elsewhere * That next segment then trips, and so on * You get a cascading effect--a domino chain of shutdowns And just to give context--15 gigawatts is huge. So whatever happened, it wasn't just a glitch in one small area. And while corona discharge on its own might not be enough to knock out a system that size, if it was happening at multiple points under extreme conditions (like ultra-dry air, possibly with high ambient temperature), it makes sense that the grid wasn't reacting fast enough to stabilise itself. Think of it like this: if you're in your kitchen and you turn on the kettle, the oven, the microwave, and the heater all at once, you might trip the circuit breaker. Not because any one thing is broken, but because the system is only designed to handle so much current at a time. What's happening inside the grid is similar--except instead of too much current, in this case it's more like certain parts of the system aren't getting enough. So when one part sees a drop, it shuts down to protect itself, and that shifts the load onto other parts, which then also trip, one after another. If the voltage dips even just a few percent--and if the system isn't prepared to handle that dynamically in real time--then that can be enough to set off a larger failure. The fact that it all came down to weather conditions that weren't expected or properly accounted for just shows how much these kinds of systems rely on accurate modelling. And when that modelling is off--even by a little--the knock-on effects can be massive. Share Cite Improve this answer Follow edited yesterday answered yesterday Nick's user avatar NickNick 1111 bronze badge New contributor Nick is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering. Check out our Code of Conduct. $\endgroup$ Add a comment | -3 $\begingroup$ It's a nonsense explanation made up by politicians. No one knows about "a phenomenon known as 'induced atmospheric vibration'". No evidence whatsoever of weather anomalies in the Iberian peninsula either. Oscillations occur in large scale grids of course, but "induced atmosferic vibration" sounds to me like whoever wrote the statement barely understood the technical explanation. Right now the whole country is in crisis mode. Let's wait for a proper investigation. Share Cite Improve this answer Follow answered 2 days ago Ricardo Rocha's user avatar Ricardo RochaRicardo Rocha 25 New contributor Ricardo Rocha is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering. Check out our Code of Conduct. $\endgroup$ 1 * 1 $\begingroup$ Climate is definitely becoming hotter. Changing just like everywhere. The measurements are consistent and easy enough to find. Get your head out of the sand: epe.es/es/espana/ 20220902/... TLDR: Average days of extreme heat: * From 1981 to 2010, 6 days * From 2011 to 2020, 14 days * In 2022, 42 days And just because you haven't heard of something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Do you work in power transmission? No? Then stay in your lane. electrical-engineering-portal.com/... $\endgroup$ - Jayson Commented yesterday Add a comment | Highly active question. Earn 10 reputation (not counting the association bonus) in order to answer this question. 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