Like a Bolt from Above

Lightning scientists begin to solve electric mysteries

 

By Alexandra Witze
Science News: November 5th, 2011; Vol.180 #10

 

In this lightning flash that researchers generated over Camp Blanding, Fla., luminous stroke sequences are blown to the left of the vertical wire that triggered the flash. D. Hill/Univ. of Florida

SOCORRO, N.M. — Ten thousand feet high in the New Mexico mountains, Jake Trueblood is getting ready to fire rockets into a thunderstorm.

He lines up eight rockets, straight as soldiers, then connects each to a wire bobbin once used to guide missiles for the French military. Trueblood arms the rockets and heads underground, then waits for hours in a windowless chamber on whose metal roof the rockets sit.

Trueblood, a graduate student at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, is waiting for a good strong electric field in the atmosphere. Then he’ll push a button that will send a whoosh of compressed air to a single rocket, sending it careening more than a thousand feet high. The goal is for the rapidly moving wire to trick the air into discharging its electricity in a lightning flash that will slam to the ground just above Trueblood’s head.

He and other lightning hunters aren’t out on the mountaintop this August day for the thrill. They’re here, at New Mexico Tech’s Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research, in search of knowledge. “We’re here because we’re trying to understand the simplest storms we know of — and we can’t,” says Graydon Aulich, a lightning researcher at the lab.

Golfers and picnickers are acutely aware of lightning and its dangers, but scientists still don’t understand it. “It’s really amazing when you think this is something that everyone knows about,” says Joseph Dwyer, a physicist at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. “But try to draw the basic picture, where the electric charges are in the cloud and where are the currents, and you realize you don’t even know how to draw the picture to start with.”

Now, however, studies like Trueblood’s are helping to flesh out that picture. Click here to continue reading the full story from Science News.