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...

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

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

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?

[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?

[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

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

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.

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: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.

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....

This is old news

[quintessent]

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

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: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.

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.

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 )

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

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

[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.