@Dale
I believe you are referring to a Faraday Cage, which requires a conductive outer surface. Obviously there are ionized layers of the atmosphere, but these do not constitute a Faraday Cage. They are air molecules which have been ionized primarily by the sun. They do not conduct direct current, so they are not capable of supporting the idea of an electrode in the sky. If they were conductive, radio telescopes wouldn't work, and radars would tell us how high it is.
If what you are saying is true, then anyone should be able to charge air in a lab and make it work like a capacitor. (An air capacitor without plates). I should be able to take a beach ball full of air, with a sealed wire poking through the ball and raise it to 20 kV or more, and come back later and measure around 19.999 kV referenced to a spike in the ground. (i.e., less whatever discharged.)
The idea of protons clustering doesn't make sense. Why would they not occupy every surface as close to the electrons they are attracted to, e. g., all metal roofing, highland lakes, whatever. Makes no sense.
Another thing that makes no sense is this: The bombardment of your Faraday cage by protons from solar wind, etc., would seem to produce hydrogen at the cost of depleting the cage of its accumulated potential. Presumably it would have crashed long ago.
You have to have conductors to set up a Faraday cage, or battery, or capacitor, whatever you're calling this. And then the forcing function has to be applied across those terminals. Otherwise, there is no cause for positive and negative to move apart.
Finally, the Faraday Cage is only skin deep. Here you're talking about - what -many miles deep? In other words, where exactly is that surface you speak of? It can't be diffused over miles of altitude - it needs a skin, and a conductive one, or the charges don't interact like a group in a conductor. There's no transport.
It took a bit of time attempt to do justice to your response. Sorry.
Lets slow down a little. First, we are not talking about a capacitor. It is a matter of excess particles of a given polarity trapped in a remote place with no partners of the opposite polarity. Next: A rule of thermodynamics holds that there are no perfect insulators: of heat or electricity. Going with that, in a cosmos with unlimited time, and barring any dynamic interference, any charged particles should eventually get to be where they want to be (if you will forgive the personification). For instance, if a planet is stuck with an extra load of electrons, we cannot say that there is no place for them to be. Everything has to be somewhere. Since they repell each other, they depart from each other, and such departure would hardly be a convergence. Thus they wind up reaching the outer surface of their host. The host might approximate a sphere or a disk. Electrons would pool up in bumps on a sphere or at the rim of a disk.
Under sufficient concentration of electrons, whether riding upon ions or “free”, some of them can emerge from solid or liquid surfaces into atmosphere or space. From there they can find a stopping place when all forces upon them balance out to zero. The electrostatic force between electrons is much stronger that their mutual gravity, but the gravity of an entire planet easily reaches from its center with a steady pull that falls to one fourth only upon a distance from its surface equal to its radius. Most of the charged planet’s repulsion upon an electron is from its closest neighbors, such that it requires modest further elevation to attenuate repulsion. Hence it will find a stopping place where it climbs no more. Were charge particles so dense that no stopping point were to be reached, electrons would then escape into space until that overintensity has been relieved. Together, those electrons above the earth might be what we call the electrosphere. The equality of each electrons charge would place them all into a relatively smooth bubble of film capable of reflecting radio waves. The array of electrons would reflect rf by shifting of particles just as electrons would flow through a conductive surface. Such virtual conduction without a host conductor would reradiate such that some radiation would proceed outwardly and some would travel back to Earth. Natural equality of interstices between electrons of the electrosphere and the slight size and mass of the electrons would hardly obscure our view of the heavens.
Faraday’s ice pail was hollow. That made room for ice, made it easier to carry, and also permitted Faraday to snoop around in there. Nevertheless, why would excess electrons not hang out at the outer extremes even if the pail was solid all the way through?
I dispute the notion that ionized atmosphe will not conduct direct current. The Fair Weather Current (FWC) is direct current. Air has a high resistance, but that does not make it a nonconductor. Its resistance is equal to the voltage-to-current ratio of the FWC.
Between opposing flats of a one meter cube of air in easy reach of the ground, that would be some 100 volts divided by some 2 picoamps to give us some 500 billion megohms per meter of elevation for a square meter column of atmosphere. I suspect that the rise of electrons as FWC is more of an ionic propagation of electrons through ions rather than free-flight of isolated electrons. To that effect, a dynamically sustained smooth distribution of electric charge throughout the atmosphere produces a virtual phenomenon of static electricity that presents that conductance through which the flow of electrons develop the positive voltage gradient.
Give us a rain-check on proton clustering until we get our global circuit under control. Too much at once calls out a circus of snipers and then the amateur head shrinkers come too and tell us it is all because we hate our mothers. But they do not prescribe any therapy.