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How to trigger lightning

By James Dacey

In the same spirit as Benjamin Franklin and his famous kite experiments, Joseph Dwyer is a scientist willing to brave electrical storms to understand more about how lightning works. He carries out his work at Florida’s International Center for Lightning Research and Testing where he fires rockets into thunderclouds to trigger lightning.

I recently caught up with Dwyer to find out a bit more about his work in this exclusive interview for physicsworld.com. He is adamant that despite our familiarity with these spectacular natural lightshows, we really don’t know all that much about what is going on. He highlights three big outstanding questions:

How lightning initiates;
How it propagates, sometimes through miles of air;
And what happens when it smashes into the ground.

At the Florida centre, Dwyer and his colleagues are trying to get a handle on these questions by creating lightning in semi-controlled conditions. “When a thunderstorm comes overhead – and that’s fairly common here in Florida since we’re the lightning capital of the US – we measure the electric fields and we can tell when conditions are good for lightning,” he says. “The lightning is going to strike anyway some place, so why don’t we make it strike here and now?”

You can read the full interview here.

Posted by James Dacey on Feb 16, 2011 4:59 PM | Permalink