Lightning Research

Mike writes: "There was a great topic covered on tonight's episode of ABC's NightLine. They discussed lightning and how a group of researchers at the University of Florida have been able to develop rockets that "pull down" lightning and allow them to gather data to help find out more about it. They can capture lightning bolts with relative ease and film the bolts with high-speed cameras, revealing that what appeared as a single flash to the naked eye was often times three or four bolts in extremely rapid succession. While the article doesn't go into the detail that was covered on TV, you do get a video clip and nice overview. And photos and additional details are available at the University of Florida's Lightning Research Lab web site."

Comments

Recycled story on ABC's part

[paulydavis]

Im pretty confident ive seen the same thing on TLC or NOVA or discovery.

Maybe this is something new.

Can anyone tell me if the ABC one is the same.

Re:Recycled story on ABC's part

[yadung]

I remember a story a long time ago(don't know which channel) where scientists set up a mock neighborhood, and sent up rockets to bring the lightning down into the neighborhoods wires to learn more about what happens when struck and how to prevent it. I think it was UF...

Re:Recycled story on ABC's part

[rottcodd]

This was big stuff at my alma mater... Langmuir Lab at New Mexico Tech

The physics department at NMT has a couple of really cool toys for being so small... They're also about 60 miles from the Very Large Array, a collection of radio telescopes. (Oh yeah, some of the movie "Contact" was filmed there)

Re:Recycled story on ABC's part

[khog]

Yeah, this is definitely old. I saw the same guys (though I didn't get to see them "high-five" each other so enthusiastically multiple times) on TLC or Discovery. ABC's never really broken scientific news, so what do you expect?

What really surprises me is that I actually happened to see this -- I never watch TV!

Re:Recycled story on ABC's part

[TheRussian]

Now that I think about it, I saw this story about two or three years ago, like paulydavis said, on either TLC or the discovery channel. Well, the University of Florida, has never really been known for its astounding scientific achievements.

An appropriate phrase

[Ghoser777]

If they collect a lot of good data, then that would be like catching lightening in a bottle, huh?

F-bacher

Old news...

[Kenshin]

I saw this on TLC at least three years ago...

Re:Old news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh....and what do you do that's so new? I got to UF and my friend was in the video. He has more important stuff to do than sit around on slashdot and whine that other people aren't cool.

Also, if you've seen this before, then you've seen the UF lab. It's the only one of its magnitude in the world.

But, of course, no one's as cool as some bitter hack like you.

Old news

[Anonymous Coward]

Benjamin Franklin did the same thing with a kite in 1752.

Re:Old news

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost correct...

Benjamin Franklin did the same thing with a kyke in 1752.

Re:Old news

[Anonymous Coward]

See also the Feynman lecture series, particularly about that 3- or 4-strokes-in-one.

Safety first

[Ghoser777]

"The intent is to make sure that we can have a safe house, so you can sit in here and watch TV while we strike it with lightning," laughs Uman.

It might be safe, but that still would be damn loud. I still wouldn't want to be the guinne pig that gets to sit in the house while they lure lightening bolts toward it. I don't care how good you say bullet proof vests are, I don't want you taking shots at me.

F-bacher

Re:Safety first

[LilGuy]

What would be the point of putting a person in the house? I'm pretty sure that was a joke. They can turn the TV on and let the lightning hit. Then if the tv's blown all over the place when they go back in, they will have learned something without endangering human life (always a plus).

Of course they could just stick monkeys or rabbits in there for testing purposes...

This is old stuff

[Skapare]

I missed ABC's Nightline, but I saw the same thing on one of the science shows on PBS over a year ago. It's very interesting stuff. But a lot of things, like multiple strokes, is old news ... 20 years old for me. I can actually see the multiple stroke activity visually and have known about it for years.

I'm not sure why they are calling it a mystery about some of the causes and actions. Perhaps the academics haven't pinned down irrefutable proof, and that's fine. But the probable sources and causes are fairly well known. They may be theories, but they are good ones.

Re:This is old stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

ABC's Nightline coverage wasn't as interesting as the one I saw on PBS many years ago, nonetheless you can see a short video here

*yawn* repeat...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is very old information and Dateline has been running a "best of" while on sabatical.

They covered the *gasp* exploding microwave water bomb AGAIN the night before.

Move along folks, nothing to see here...

Power source?

[HongPong]

I have always wondered about the possibility of harnessing lightning's energy as a source of electricity. While I'm not an electrical expert in ANY sense, I wonder if it would be possible to develop a gigantic antenna, grounded, which would attract lightning, and milliseconds after the initial strike, a very powerful relay would flip the lightning's course from an open path to the ground into some ridiculously strong diodes and battery configuration. Obviously this wouldn't be feasible unless, at the least, diodes and relays capable of handling millions of volts and lots of amps (does static electricity have amperes?) are developed.

I have no idea if this is at all possible, or even remotely logical, but I'd like to hear what someone who's an expert thinks.

Re:Power source?

[Ghoser777]

Heck yeah! Remember from Back to the Future? You could get 1.21 Gigawatts of power from a single bolt of lightning!

The catch is that lightening doesn't usually strike at the same place over and over. With a nice, big thunderstorm you could get a bunch of thunderstrikes, but most of the time I'd bet you could only get a couple. It may be more costly to create and maintain the facility to harness lightening than the savings would be from the generated energy.

F-bacher

Re:Power source?

[danlor]

Actually, there are places that get struck quite often. I used to live in Gardner Montana, and it was situated in a valley right below a mountain named "Electric Peak". It got its name from the lightning that constantly struck it. It was a very high, conductive chunk of granite, that happened to be the highest thing around (12,000 feet). That's as close to a collector as you will get.

Re:Power source?

[Swaffs]

I am not an electrical expert either, but the idea of flipping a switch really fast to divert lightning into a battery seems a little impossible. As I understand it, a lightning bolt is just a massive shift in electrons, rather than say a giant ball of them jumping to the ground. To cut-off the low-resistance path would kill the electrical potential and would instantly stop the flow. It would seem to me that to continue the flow would require that electricity have momentum.

Re:Power source?

[HeghmoH]

It's entirely possible, but the trouble is that lightning just doesn't contain all that much energy. If you lived in an area with a whole lot of thunderstorms, and you owned a large amount of land on which to place your collectors, you could probably power your house off the lightning strikes you got, but it isn't something that could power a city.

Re:Power source?

[slashdot2.2sucks]

I suppose you could use the lightning to charge a big capacitor and then slowly drain the capacitor to use the energy.

But the expense of the capacitor, and the low probability of lightning strike would not make profit.

But perhaps this could be used cheaply power pulse technology, like the stuff at Los Alamos Labs

Re:Power source?

[knightbg]

I saw part of this, and if I recall correctly, they kind of poo-pooed this as impractical, along with using it as a weapon.

Re:Power source?

[brainboyz]

They actually designed a system for it a few years back. The idea was to initiate enough voltage to gap the extreme resistance between ground and the clouds, then divert the amperage generated to a huge storage facility once the bolt had established an ionized air path. Once the air had ionized, it was easier to maintain the stream (for milliseconds).

However, the equipment involved was cost prohibitive, despite the fact that one thunderstorm could litteraly power a city for some amount of time (cant remember exactly). The scientists believed that this would be great for places like Texas where thunderstorms are common.

As for the lightning hitting rarely in one area, they found if you're the only large, highly conductive object for miles you get a much higher chance of being hit by lightning. One steel building in the middle of a flat area with a big antenna on top is going to attract lighting many times per storm.

Re:Power source?

[Skapare]

Lightning is just an artifact of existing energy fields. You could reap that energy even before there are lightning strikes (and on a large enough scale, perhaps reduce the lightning or even eliminate it). The "antenna" would basically be a bunch of very tall lightning rods. Lightning rods don't serve to attract lightning, but rather, serve to dissipate static charges that are exaggerated during a thunderstorm. That dissipation does result in a flow (amperes is a measure of electrical current, coulombs is the measure of electrical charge, and farads is the measure of the capacity to store an electrical charge). The trick to accomplishing what your suggest is to avoid the air insulation breakdown that results in a sudden flow (the lightning stroke). The problem is that unless the rods are very tall, the flow is inhibited by extreme air resistance until the breakdown occurs (which is very rapid when it happens, with rarely more than a few seconds notice, if that). I'd guess that the height needed to efficiently exploit air charges would be 1 to 5 kilometers. Once you get that high, you will get currents even without the thunderstorms.

Benjamin Franklin's key experiment supposedly didn't actually get a stroke of lightning, but got a charge fed to it that perhaps was coming close to breakdown voltage. But that charge could have developed even without the storm, although at a lower level. A charge develops in the atmosphere every day due to photon energy striking the atmosphere within a magnetic field. The air serves as an insulator, and you have a giant capacitor. Lifting in the air, which occurs more extreme during a thunderstorm, changes the dynamics of that capacitor, reducing its farad measure, and given a constant of coulombs, raises the voltage of the charge. Raise it enough and the air insulation breaks down. But the charge is there all the time. The question in science is just how much of that charge comes from various sources. Apparently the charge from sunlight isn't enough to bring about the level of lightning we actually see.

Another source of energy you can extract from a thunderstorm is lateral charge shifts from horizontal storm movement. The storm carries a concentrated charge, and to balance that out, the earth exhibits a counter charge gathered near the surface to be as close as possible to the storm. That charge moves along with the storm. This charge movement is often the source of damaging levels of electrical current in some extended wiring like rural telephone lines. I've watched the charges dance off lines miles from thunderstorms. There might be a way, given wide open spaces, to exploit that.

The lateral charge effect can also cause some interesting lighting. I once saw a lightning stroke emerge from the half way up the back side of a tall thundercloud into the clear air in its wake, and jump some 10 to 12 km back, then bend down to the ground. The earth charge hadn't followed fast enough and apparently got built up way back there somewhere.

I had another interesting experience once when taking advantage of a clear weather break in the midst of a stormy week, to do some site surveying for radio coverage when I was doing storm spotting years ago. I first noticed some strange whistling sounds in my car AM radio. It started at a high pitch and dropped down to nothing in about 1 to 4 seconds, repeating after after another 1-4 seconds. When they started coming faster I started feeling some "static bites" in my handheld 2m ham radio (KA9WGN) which was connected to an antenna on the car roof. I pulled off the antenna connector from the radio and put the tip of the BNC connector pin (which went to the actual antenna rod itself, which being a 5/8-wave style, had no loading coil) up to the keys in the car ignition switch. At about 1 cm distance, a spark jumped across. At about 3 mm distance, it sustained a spark repeating about every 2/3 second continuously. I opened the car window and looked around and up, and saw a small cloud forming directly above. It was very small, not any larger than a "partly cloudy day" kind of cloud. But I decided to drive away anyway. About 10 minutes later I was 3 miles south east and looked back northwest and saw that my little cloud had become a billowing thunderhead. 5 minutes later there were cloud to ground strokes.

Re:Power source?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's very interesting, enjoyed your comment

Re:Power source?

[jafuser]

I agree, and another problem I see is that if the circuit that you use to collect this energy has much resistance (from doing work), it would seem that the lightning would not strike there becuase there would be less resistance instead if it just struck the ground next to your collector.

Re:Power source?

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in 1998,after a bad thunderstorm, I was looking out
of my bedroom window at the edge of one of the clouds which
was thin enough that the moon was shining through. I saw lightning
flash through this edge. There was no thunder, or anything,
but the flashes continued about 5 seconds apart. It was
very unusual indeed. I stood at my window and watched for
about 20-30 minutes as these flashes continued. This went
on for so long that I went to the bathroom, confident
that when I got back, it would still be happening (I was
right). It was also getting closer to my house, so I
started to think about the possibility of a direct strike.
(I collected all of my important disks and kept them
with me, just incase :)

A couple years before, after a horrendous and very violent thunderstorm,
I did see static sparks jump around the metal frame of my bedroom
window.

Re:Power source?

[sphealey]

"Obviously this wouldn't be feasible unless, at the least, diodes and relays capable of handling millions of volts and lots of amps (does static electricity have amperes?) are developed."

Unfortunately, I have seen the heaviest electrical equipment you can imagine (765kV distribution gear with ceramic insulators 2m high) blown into fragments by lightning strikes. There isn't much call for ultra-high voltage, ultra-high frequency (which is what lightning is) stuff in the normal world, so very little is known about how to handle that kind of energy.

Beside, if you just want to get rid of the strike, plain old lightning rods and lightning busters (grounded towers with hundreds of small points to dissipate the charge) do a pretty good job. Usually!

sPh

Re:Stephen King, author, dead at 54

[Ghoser777]

Why the hell does someone always post this stupid lie everytime a slashdot story is posted? I thought someone was serious the first time.

F-bacher

old news, but neat toys

[beanerspace]

Man, I thought we were hot stuff as kids when we'd put an M80 where the parachute was supposed to go in our Estes Rockets ... but puling down lightening ... and getting pictures of it. Now that's a neat trick !

BTW, saw this story almost a year ago. Must be summer re-runs.

If only this research had been done sooner

[alewando]

Uman and his team pull lightning bolts down from storm clouds by firing rockets that function similarly to Ben Franklin's kite. Each rocket trails a wire more than 1,000 feet high, which attracts lightning from miles up and sends it down to the ground. A few feet away, the researchers watch the fireworks from the safety of a laboratory building.

If only we'd had this unmanned technology sooner, then so many Furbies wouldn't have been lost in the name of science.

Superheating with Bolts...

[Zergwyn]

Experiments like this were done many years ago, but with the rockets carrying wires so that the lightning would hit a pit filled with certain materials like sand. The intense heat sometimes fused stuff in unusual ways. I remember reading that it was by this method that the third molecular form of carbon, Buckminsterfullerenes(Buckyballs) was found. (The first 2 are graphite and diamond)

Re:Superheating with Bolts...

[Negadecimal]

I remember reading that it was by this method that the third molecular form of carbon, Buckminsterfullerenes(Buckyballs) was found. (The first 2 are graphite and diamond)

Buckyballs were discovered by a Houston team that fired a high-intensity laser at a graphite sheet, and ran a mass-spec on the resulting carbon dust. They found a big spike at C60 (and C70, I believe). As it later turned out, burning a candle is enough to produce buckyballs... no lightning needed.

I've wondered if we could power some really energy-demaning reactions with lightning... like starting off a cold fusion reaction or something. Of course, getting predictable thunderstorms is another matter.

Very very frightening..

[tcd004]

Based on all the posts here claiming this is old news, it looks like this reseach is benefiting the news directors of television magazine shows more than anyone else....

Tcd004

Like a Condit on the Run

Re:Very very frightening..

[Kalani]

Well why do you think pseudo/pop-Science exists in the first place?

Nothing new here.. but here's the run down.

[riven1128]

I saw this same thing a couple of years back .. the rocket gets fired up, lightning comes down the guide wire. They use this to test the effects of lightning on electronic equipment and to try to find ways to prevent lightning damage. They also use it ofcourse to study lightning and learn more about it.

They have people pay them so that their stuff can be tested. There was one company that had their breaker box tested and photographed after it was nuked so that they could see where most of the damage occured. Pretty interesting stuff.

Fuck yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

They've been doing this for over 30 years

Re:Fuck yeah

[Kira-Baka]

That website is apparently using HTML 2.0 :P Go look at the source (at least they even add the DOCTYPE tag :)

Also a problem for lunar tourists

[kingdon]

Reminds me of when the Apollo 12 mission to the moon was struck by lightning shortly after liftoff. Here's an article including pictures. Pretty amazing that the spacecraft's electronics survived this and they still managed to go to the moon after rebooting everything. Here's an item from the RISKS digest about one of the reasons why that worked.

Re:Also a problem for lunar tourists

[tsarina]

Airplanes are also often struck by lightning in mid-flight. However, the outer shell of metal diverts the electricity away from the passengers, electronics, peanuts, etc. so it's almost never a big deal. This is also the reason why cars are a pretty good shelter in a thunderstorm - the metal outside keeps the bolt from frying the passengers.

Lightning Research/Camp Blanding

[emolitor]

The Lightning Research UF does is pretty cool. I drove by (what is and what became) their research facility going to and through Gainseville for years.

The research is done at a former military base (camp blanding IIRC). The rockets are shot from the old repelling tower (gives a slight boost as the tower is right about the same height as the pine trees that surround the facility) You can park on the highway and see where they launch the rockets from. Just dont walk around there with any big metal poles during a storm.

The rockets occasionally trigger natural lightning which is much stronger than the "triggered" lightning caused by the rockets. Its pretty cool to watch but in general its so bright and so fast you really dont see much other than the light trail burned on your retina.

Neat stuff.

Re:Lightning Research/Camp Blanding

[Miragejp]

Yep, Dr. Uman and his guys are pretty cool, too - he is the dept. chair for the EE department there at UF - unfortunately, my studies concentrated on Power and DSP, so I never got a chance to take any courses that he taught.

maybe older ....

[taniwha]

I'm pretty sure I first saw the PBS show 4-5 years back, they also showed someone doing similar work in the mid west.

Re:maybe older ....

[Skapare]

Yeah, that show could have been much older. Come to think of it I saw it around 2AM, when the local PBS affiliate, KERA, often shows reruns of PBS programming. Often they will batch a bunch of related shows together, like run 6 Nova's back to back, late at night if there's no school programming to feed. Those do that on weekend afternoons, too. Beats football.

Well

[Anonymous Coward]

We need to start pulling lightning down onto the power lines near Microsoft. Go, my Slashdot men, and strike them to cinders!

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Then Microsoft would blame the lightnings for Windows downtime.

TV news

[mattdm]

While the article doesn't go into the detail that was covered on TV ...

Now there's something you don't hear every day....

Re:TV news

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that was a joke of sorts, but in this case you actually do hear that every day. They post an abbreviated version of what was on Nightline the night before to ABCNews.com every day.

PICTURES....

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are a few links with pictures and more info:

• http://sprite.gi.alaska.edu/html/sprites.htm
  
• http://thunder.msfc.nasa.gov/primer/primer3.html
  
• http://geology.about.com/library/weekly/aa020198.h tm?rnk=r7&terms=lightning
  
• http://ibis.nmt.edu/sprites/sprites.html

Re:PICTURES....

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent down, please. Not a nipple to be seen anywhere in those pictures.

Lightening video's

[BrookHarty]

Anyone know where you can get lightening storms on video? I use to sit on the back porch watching lightening and it was very relaxing. Now I'm living in the city, something like this would be nice to play on the bigscreen. :) Are there places to buy videos of Fireplaces, Fish tanks, Beaches, Forests, Nature settings, etc? (DVD would be best)

Re:Lightening video's

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you need to get a life klercky average -1 posts.

Re:Lightening video's

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who averages -1 on slashdot has a life by definition.

Poor Little Elian

[Anonymous Coward]

Your comment violated the postercomment compression filter. Comment aborted

This is old news

[quintessent]

Figured it hadn't been said yet, you know.

Because of static....

[BLAG-blast]

...I find this sort of research positively shocking......

Re:Nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

I have nowhere else to go. Slashdot has made me stupid. I have become an autistic social misfit. I am disappearing into my open source navel. For the love of all that is Right, help me.

Slashdot's Parent stock reaches $1.37

[Anonymous Coward]

I predict that within a week the value of a share in Slashdot's Parent (having announced a pending name change we can't refer to it as VALinux anymore) will fall to less than one dollar. Then comes Nasdaq delisting and bankrupcy. What then, Commander Taco, a job at Taco Belle making Tacos?

Too often, Slashdot is off topic.

[Futurepower(tm)]

I would like to be a Wizard, and be able to throw thunderbolts from my fingers.

Can you believe it? That comment is on topic.

Too often, Slashdot is off topic. I like science, but I would like to see a higher percentage of computer-related articles.

We are in the middle of one of the biggest and most amazing social revolutions in history. More than 100,000 very well-educated people have decided to form a loose brotherhood and sisterhood to give the world a complete computer operating system. There are many stories in that.

I think there should be more stories about software development. Many of the big issues aren't being discussed enough, in my opinion. For example, there needs to be a more vigorous debate about computer language development.

Another thing I like about Slashdot.

[Futurepower(tm)]

That's another thing I like about Slashdot. Everyone is so kind!

Great Scott!!!!!

[pjbass]

1.21 jigawatts?! How could I be so sloppy??

Nightline was very informative.

[Schwarzchild]

I realize that a lot of people are posting that it is old news but I haven't seen this before and I haven't seen anybody talk about the truly bizarre lightning phenomena that they discussed on Nightline, that is, the wide weakly powered lightning which occurs above the clouds (called Sprites, I believe), the high powered lightning that shoots out from clouds and goes up into the upper atmosphere and lightning that spreads like a halo (called Elves)

They also posited that the Sprites may be weak enough that they could have caused life to form. Other theorists had thought that lightning might have caused life but the power from regular lightning is too strong; however, this new form of lightning is weak enough that it might do the trick according to the researchers.

The blue jets that emanate from clouds and rise up into the upper atmosphere are supposed to be extremely powerful and are considered a danger to stratospheric aircraft, rockets and the space shuttle.

All in all it seems to be very strange phenomena. Add ball lightning to the mystery.

A Scientic American link on Sprites and Elves.

Re:Nightline was very informative.

[snake_dad]

Not to put you down, but those sprites are also old news. I remember seeing footage of this, as seen from space, a shuttle movie iirc. Awesome :)

You can find some of the images and movies here, or do a bit of googling.

Re:Nightline was very informative.

[Skapare]

Where there is a charge, there is counter charge of the opposite polarity. The storm's lifting process spreads the charge between upper and lower parts of the storm. But that's not enough to balance things out. Counter charges exist in the earth below (and follow the storm) as well in the air far above the storm. When a lightning strike happens, the charge level drops suddenly, and the counter charges now have to go somewhere and quickly. I believe the sprites are the result of this bleed off of the charges about a strike. And yes, that would make them very powerful.

As for lightning forming life, it could happen anyway because the lightning is basically going to be energizing molecules which can then come back to gether it all sorts of ways as they cool down after the current stops. Life could result from enough of the carbon based building blocks having been put together, or later come together, in the right way to be able to reproduce the same molecules some way. The formation of life this way could be an extremely rare event. But even if it only occurs once in billions of years in our galaxy, you can bet that's where we'll end up being.

Re:Nightline was very informative.

[mystclady]

same stuff, saw all of it more than 5 years ago.
(Discover Channel)

Why??

[pjbass]

Why was the parent modded down? Even though there was probably only a search run on Google for these links, it still required a bit more work than firing off his mouth... I think he should be given at least one for being informative. IMHO.

Re: mmhm

[Anonymous Coward]

uhhhh what do you suppose the likelyhood of that fusion reaction being "cold" if it needed the energy contained in a bolt of lightning to ignite.

How big is a bolt of lightning

[Mezzrow]

Hmmm. When I was younger I was curious how wide (actual length) a bolt of lightning actually was. I was curious if it was just brightness or actual size that gave a bolt its appearance. I went to the extent of calling local Seattle meteorologists and asking them. The answer was always a polite 'shove off'. I wonder if these guys would know.

Re:How big is a bolt of lightning

[brainboyz]

I don't know exactly, but it's probably brightness. An electron stream of that thickness would be well past gigamps considering the size of an electron. Get a teacher to ask "on behalf of a kindergarden class"...usually they'll annswer then :)

Re:How big is a bolt of lightning

[Anonymous Coward]

National Geographic's article a few years back claimed the actual flowstream was about as big around as your pinky finger.

But really, how do you measure something like that? "OOH! Thunderheads! Now what did I do with my calipers...?"

-FATS

Re:How big is a bolt of lightning

[Hektor_Troy]

Don't hold me to this, but I think the answer can be found at the beach, of all places.

Sometimes lightning strikes at the beach, and the heat from the strike will cause the sand to turn into glass around the bolt. If you could find such a "petrified lightning bolt", you would know the size of that bolt. Find enough of them, and you would have a general idea about the circumfrence of lightning bolts.

Now - I doubt you have to go scour every beach/desert/[sandy place] nearby, trying to find petrified lightning bolts - I'd vager a dollar that either the state's museums of science, universities and/or metereological weather stations have some lying around, either for research or just for show. Either way, it can't really hurt to ask around.

kuro5hin.org

[Anonymous Coward]

Inoshiro here. With Hex still not in the new colo cage as a temp fixup while we move around things to Bubba, I decided to throw up this status page. Bubba will be taking over the main K5 page serving while Hex joins Zephyr and Andrew Hurst's box as a support machine. Some of the support machines (specifically Kaneda, the big storage box) will also be bobbing up and down soon, but you probably won't notice it like the Hex Bubba move :) Zephyr/Thock.com will also soon be peered on two separate ISPs to avoid more problems by those Sasktel idiots (who will no longer be receiving my business).

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

They're trying hard to be like Slashdot in every possible way. Pretty pathetic.

Re: cool!

[deglr6328]

Apparently you can send them materials you want "fulguritized"! neat!

On an offtopic note it took about 10 goddamn tries to get this through the lameness filter. good work guys.

Weapon?

[Anonymous Coward]

If i can guide this rocket?.. would i be able to hit specific targets with bolts of lightning?

that would be pretty interesting. and appears to be reletivly cheap to manufature and implement.

Re:Weapon?

[orius_khan]

Only if you could launch the rocket from the target area (the trailing wire from the launch site is the path that the lightning travels down). And if can make your way to the target area with a rocket like that, you might as well go there with a bomb instead.

If you wanted a rocket that you could launch from a significant distance and drop the wire over your target and hold it there until lightning hits it, you'd need much more complex and expensive equipment to do so. Not to mention figuring out a way to keep it from getting hit before it's touching the target. But again, if you're going to launch rockets that accurately at your target, you might as well have them explode and do a lot more damage than a lightning bolt could.

The only advantage I can think of might be to make your strike look like a natural occurance instead of man-made destruction. However, once word leaked out that a certain power had the ability to direct lightning bolts, every lightning bolt that caused somebody damage somewhere could lead to an instant accusation. A giant political mess!

It's an interesting thought though. If the technology to guide such missiles were made cheap enough, it could be used by small renegade armies that can't afford the highly destructive but enormously expensive conventional missiles. A small band of guerillas in the forest launching hordes of Estes rockets at an army camp during a storm sounds hilarious but might not be so far fetched...

nothing new

[mjsottile]

They do similar work here in New Mexico (#2 for lightning next to Fla.), with the rockets and the lightning. I think this was on some TV channel at least 3 years ago.... Not really deserving of mention here it seems, but then again, I don't choose the articles.

Re:nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

...in the mountains around Santa Fe IIRC.

Re:nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

Actualy it was in the hills between couldcroft and roswell, The "kid" featured started schooling in NM, and transfered to FL.

Cool stuff on Amasci

[DGolden]

There's some cool electricity experiments on amasci

Lots of other cool stuff too, lots of build-it-yourself things that actually work (and lots that probably don't, like electrical rockets, but they're in a separate category )

In Mourning

[mystclady]

How sad.... Now I have to wear black. But then again, I always wear black........

Re:In Mourning

[los furtive]

...no, sad is watching people take the same bus/metro back and forth every day. Life is what you make of it: if you want to spend all day sulking, that's your perogative. If you want to wear black, go for it, but doesn't a tie-dye shirt just bring a little bit more a of a smile to your face? Did you know that there aren't any trees with black leaves. When you're dead things will be black enough, why start now? And since when does fashion matter anyways?

500,000,000 volts at 10,000 amps

[Futurepower(tm)]

A lightning discharge is perhaps 500,000,000 volts at 10,000 amps.

Interesting references:

Great Lightning Photos -- West Virginia Lightning

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about Lightning

Human Voltage -- What happens when people and lightning converge

Lightning Concepts

Re:500,000,000 volts at 10,000 amps

[Weh]

that's 5*10^9 Volts * 10^4 Amps = 5*10^13 Watts ?
Or 50,000 Gigawatts (for those thinking in Back to the future units). 5*10^13 Watts seems way to much to get out of a lightning bolt.

Re: That's what the references say.

[Futurepower(tm)]

Actually 5*10^8 Volts * 10^4 Amps = 5*10^12 Watts

That's what the references say.

Video from The Learning Channel

[X-Nc]

I have a video from TLC on this showing the guys with the rockets that I got 5 or 6 years ago. I also got one on Tornados and one on Huricanes. Very cool stuff. You should be able to buy them from their web site.

Re: That's what the references say.

[Weh]

yeah, you're right. Still seems like an awful lot though, considering that that is 5000 GigaWatts. Most powerplants produce power in the MegaWatt range IIRC.

Blanding and Kingsley Lake

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a house on Kingsley lake, about 2 miles from their research site. I was not aware they were doing research on Blanding until a few years ago when a sign appeared on route 230. Until this article, I was not aware of the rocket launches from there....

The UF team has been doing lightening research for MANY years. I had some of the members as professors
when getting my EE back in 81. Back then, they used a trailer and went down by Tampa every summer. I understood that the Tampa area was #1 for lightening.

I believe the team even had an experiment on Gallelo.

I can vouch for the lightening near Blanding. We used to watch storms from the dock. Lots and lots of bolts. One hit a tree about 50 feet from our house a few years ago -- while we were in the house and my son was looking out the window....

New Mexico Lightning Research

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably most of everyone's recollections of seeing this a few years ago has to do with a show on it on TLC or Discovery. That show was documenting some of the research that is done at New Mexico Tech in Socorro, New Mexico.

Every Summer, a bunch of teachers and students make the trip up South Baldy mountain to the Langmuir Lab in the hopes of triggering lightning.

It's not as easy as it might sound to trigger lightning. In fact, the Summer my roommate was up there (1992, I think), they weren't able to trigger any lightning.

Basically, someone would keep watch for promising storm clouds to come over the lab. Once the clouds got closer, they would start checking an electric field mill, a device used to measure the strength of the storm-induced fields. When the field was sufficiently high, a person sitting in what was essentially a steel pup tent would fire the rocket into the cloud, hoping to generate a strike along the metal cord that it carried with it.

Even though they didn't get any lightning that year, National Geographic sent up a photojournalist, who snapped some photo's of them. In late '92 or early '93, National GeoGraphic did have a small one or two page article on it at the back of the magazine, so they did get some recognition.

By the way, New Mexico Tech is also the same place where the NRAO is located (what is essentially the command post for the VLA radio telescope. It's the one seen in Contact.

They also do explosives research there, too. I've seen a show or two on TLC/Discovery that featured them. It's a neat school. Very underrated...and cheap, too!

--NMT, Class of '93

Re:New Mexico Lightning Research

[Anonymous Coward]

For more information, check out the Langmuir Lab web site.

--NMT, Class of '93

Re:New Mexico Lightning Research

[Anonymous Coward]

Practically unrelated, but I'm posting regardless. I'm a current student at NMT, and I really do enjoy good 'ole EMRTC. It's often interesting to play the "thunder or explosive testing?" game with friends during thunderstorms. Several classes a year (namely the mechanical or chemical engineers, but sometimes others) go to see explosive demonstrations. Even if you couldn't care less about learning anything, explosive welding is still great fun to watch.

EMRTC is seeming to expand its current horizons, though, and is hosting some anti-terrorism research and training. Quite interesting to see armed guys (okay, the pistols aren't real, but they still have 'em) in fatigues eating in the cafeteria. Well, I've wasted enough time.

--NMT, hopeful class of '04

More Info

[nuclearsnake]

On Sept. 7th TLC is going to air their show about lightning. Well not lightning, but rather ball lightning. More info can be found at:

• http://tlc.discovery.com/schedule/episode.jsp?epis ode=551555000

Alternative Lightning Collection techniques

[Ronin Developer]

Shooting rockets with trail wires is one way to get a bolt to strike the same location twice. Another technique that I read about some six months ago was to use a laser.

A high powered laser would be shot towards an approaching thunderhead. The laser would also superheat the air in its path producing a conductive plasma. The electrical discharge from the cloud would then travel down this path where it would meet up with a lighting rod. There was talk about using this technique to take the punch out of potentially severe thunderstorms.

The technique of using Estes rockets certainly is probably a lot cheaper than a high powered laser...but you'd get a lot more shots with the laser.

Johny-come-lately

[overshoot]

I'm rather disappointed that nobody remembers some of the original lightning/rocket work done at New Mexico Tech's Langmuir Research Center. They've been "drawing down lightning" there for fifty years.

Besides, Tech has some of the best green chile con carne around. Especially for a University cafeteria!

Re:Johny-come-lately

[Valen Faerlwynd]

That's what I was going to say!
They're treating it like it's a brand new technology.

Re:Johny-come-lately

[overshoot]

Valen Faerlwynd responded:
That's what I was going to say!

You like their green chile too?

Tesla...Again.

[cr0sh]

Heh, heh - you aren't the first to think this.

One of the first to really think about this was Nikola Tesla.

Mr. Tesla was granted several patents related to transmitting power without wires, utilizing the earth and the ionosphere as basically opposing plates of a large capacitor, allowing one to draw off the excess energy (pumped in via remote Tesla coil systems), from anywhere on the globe, using a simple antenna-like receiving unit.

Tesla was very familiar with lightning, as his patent #1266175 "Lightning Protector" proves. This device appears similar to some of the experimental Colorado Springs "antenna" he used for various experiments - so he undoubtedly saw the possibility of using such a device to pull energy from the air as well as put it there.

I think (and this is pure conjecture), that Tesla also experimented with "free" energy - pulling off excess charge using similar equipment, and maybe actually using it to drive certain small devices. I find a reference in the book "The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla" (ISBN 0-88029-812-X) about an "Alternate Current Electrostatic Induction Apparatus", which was apparently first published as an article by Tesla in "The Electrical Engineer" on May 6, 1891. In the description of the device, Tesla writes that "The output of such an apparatus is very small, but some of the effects peculiar to alternating currents of short periods may be observed."

I haven't found any patent on this device in "The Complete Patents of Nikola Tesla" (edited by Jim Glenn - ISBN 1-56619-266-8), so maybe Tesla, at the time, didn't consider it something worthy of a patent, because it didn't give anything useful.

I still wonder though if maybe he thought there was a way to actually harness "free" energy in lightning and other static electricity, in a way that the "common man" could use independant of the electric "company" - which was just starting to really come into being in Tesla's time. After all, a Leydon jar is nothing more than a form of a capacitor, and a static electrical charge (like lightning) can be used to charge such a device - maybe he was looking for a way to actually use the charge. Perhaps making electricity too cheap to meter (I can imagine a large field of his lightning protectors charging Leydon jars, which are bled off and feed the electrostatic-to-AC conversion devices, the AC which is sent on the customers, or to an individual)...

Re: Power plants produce energy.

[Futurepower(tm)]

I think I have found the confusion. Power plants produce energy. Energy is power over time, watt-hours.

Lightning is of very short duration. The power is great, but the energy is small compared to a power plant.

In an hour, a one-megawatt power plant produces one megawatt-hour of energy. A lightning bolt of 5,000 gigawatts that lasts 70 microseconds produces only (5 * 10^12) * (7 * 10^-5) = 3.5 * 10^9 watt-seconds, which is only 97,000 watt-hours.

97,000 watt-hours is slightly less than the energy used by a thousand 100 watt light bulbs in one hour.

Still, you are right, it seems like a huge amount.

Re: But, I made a mistake.

[Futurepower(tm)]

But, I made a mistake. If the figures we are using are correct, the energy of one 70 microsecond flash is 972,000 watt-hours, not 97,200 watt-hours, because there are 3,600 seconds in one hour.

However, the power plant keeps on ticking, whereas lightning is a relatively rare event.

Lightning

[nintendonut]

Didn't see the episode, but by the looks of these posts, it seems its old news to everyone. Plus I can recall a science class we talked about that.

Hehe, speaking of science, I watched a video the other day of tornadoes.. one guy was doing a home video and was just about right next to the tornadoe and got struck by lightning. 10 seconds later, he got up saying "uh, I got struck by lightning" and kept on filming. He then went to a porch and was knocked out by debris but 30 seconds later got up and kept filming.. hehe I can't imagine it not hurting that badly to that guy..

Old hat

[Anonymous Coward]

zzzZZZZZzzzz

Re: But, I made a mistake.

[CatKnight]

Most large power plants in the United States operate in the 1-2 gigawatt range. This amount is not an amount of energy, but rather the capacity. A 1 gigawatt nuclear power plant can produce 1 gigawatt of energy in 1 hour, or 1 gigawatt-hour.

Re: Power plants produce energy.

[Weh]

You've got a point though you're not right on everything.

Power = energy/time.

therefore: energy = Power * time.

1 Watt is equal to 1 Joule/second.

Joule is the unit for energy, this is the same as a watt-second as you call it.

A watt/hour unit is an energy (energy/time * time) unit because power companies charge for the total amount of energy, not for fluctuating power. Power companies are appropriately named so because they provide power, consumers decide how much power they use. Measuring a powerplants capacity by it's power-generation ability is correct because in theory every powerplant could deliver infinite amounts of energy given infinite time.

In the end to calculate the energy (which you correctly did) you need to multiply the power by time. If lightning lasts for 70 microseconds it generates 5000 * 10^9 * 70*10^-5 = 3.5 * 10^9 Joules. (A Watt-Second is equal to a Joule).
Anyway, this is about the same amount of energy required to lift a 100 ton airplane 3.5 km into the sky. (ignoring friction and engine innefficiency etc.)

this rocks!

[philthpig]

i happen to be a uf engineering student. i know one of the grad assistants that work at this lab. they pull off some very impressive stuff. this may have been on TLC (i actually saw that years ago and it thrills me to be this close to it now) but they aren't performing the same research as then. The kick-ass bit is the fact that they are the only fully functional lab of their kind... they kick bootie yo.

wow...

No, you're just stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, they just filmed this over the summer. I go to UF, my friend was in the video, and it's not a repeat.

Dumbass.