Abstract
Data on the diurnal variation of the air-earth current and electric field obtained on the Carnegie ship cruises in 1928-29; at Thule, Greenland in 1958-59; and at the Amundsen-Scott Station at the South Pole in 1964 are compared from a numerical point of view. The normalized results are found not to agree. The analysis of the degree of significance of the disagreements reveals that different methods of normalizing yield drastically different interpretations; expressing the data as a percentage of the yearly mean renders the differences in the results insignificant at the 75% level while, if a daily mean is employed, those differences are found to be significant at the 90% level. The effects of various normalizing procedures on the dispersion of the data are also discussed. How unawareness of the errors arising even in simple averaging of data on atmospheric electric parameters leads to meaningless and often contradictory results is illustrated.
