PRECIPITATION OF PARTICLES FROM THE EARTH RADIATION BELTS AND ATMOSPHERIC VORTEX STRUCTURES
Lightning discharges emit packets of electromagnetic waves that penetrate the ionospheric and magnetospheric heights. As a result, electrostatic and electromagnetic disturbances in unstable plasma cause stimulated precipitation of charged particles. It is shown that during the formation of waveguide channels in geomagnetic field tubes, electromagnetic waves trapped in plasma waveguides provoke the precipitation of energetic charged particles from the radiation belts of the Earth into the atmosphere. In the cascades of precipitating particles, atmospheric particles, in particular aerosols, are ionized. Plasma vortices are excited in the atmosphere at plasma pressure gradients orthogonal to the geomagnetic field. When plasma vortices interact with high-altitude Rossby waves at the rotary genetic level, powerful atmospheric vortex structures are formed. Electromagnetic waves, reflecting from layers of ionospheric plasma in magnetically conjugated regions, stimulate the precipitation of particles at two opposite boundaries of the geomagnetic field tube. The wave packets emitted by lightning discharges affect the atmospheric vortex structure that generates the discharges, both directly and through the resulting positive feedback. If waveguide channels are formed in some region above the vortex structure, then the stimulated precipitation of particles affects atmospheric processes in the region, which is magnetically conjugated to it also.