3 ms·

I read this mainly to see what Dr. Dwyer was up to in regards to this. I was in the same grad school as his group at FIT. I was also working on gamma ray dete

I read this mainly to see what Dr. Dwyer was up to in regards to this. I was in the same grad school as his group at FIT. I was also working on gamma ray detectors at the time, so we would occasionally talk. Their big challenge was the range of the rays in the atmosphere. But I also think that they had a lot of fun - they would initiate lightning strikes by shooting rockets into clouds. That way they knew where to set up their detectors. http://www.lightning.ece.ufl.edu/PDF/Dwyer_et_2009a.pdf http://www.lightning.ece.ufl.edu/PDF/Dwyer_et_2009a.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_rocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_rocket https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buSaGIoNXu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buSaGIoNXu8

Shivetya 6y ago
Reading the wiki and some related patents I am curious how many such rockets would be required to sufficiently protect a region from random lightning strikes. Are there methods to determine the potential for a storm to generate lighting or simply how much energy is potentially there to create them?
- FiatLuxDave 6y ago
  Its not my field, but I'm pretty sure that the potential for a storm to generate lightning is strongly related to the CAPE (convective available potential energy), which is often measured by meteorologists using sounding balloons, or I presume, using more modern indirect (radar,lidar) methods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convective_available_potential_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convective_available_potential... I live in Florida, where we have a fairly high frequency of lightning strikes (although nothing like Congo). Here is a map of global lightning strikes per year per km^2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_lightning#/media/File:Global_Lightning_Frequency.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_lightning#/med... Whether a single rocket system would drain enough charge from a storm to prevent other lightning strikes, I don't know. I used to think about how to set up a continuous conduction path to the ionosphere as a form of power generation. Any material path would likely be destroyed, but in theory a stabilized plasma could provide essentially an unending lightning strike draining the global atmospheric charge imbalance. But, this isn't an easy problem (it's a long way up to the ionosphere), and the amount of energy in global lightning is surprisingly small when compared to other natural sources like solar, tides, geothermal, etc. Very concentrated though!
cmehdy 6y ago
> initiate lightning strikes by shooting rockets into clouds That's what should be shared when people think that science isn't heavy-metal enough.

Shivetya 6y ago

Reading the wiki and some related patents I am curious how many such rockets would be required to sufficiently protect a region from random lightning strikes. Are there methods to determine the potential for a storm to generate lighting or simply how much energy is potentially there to create them?

FiatLuxDave 6y ago
Its not my field, but I'm pretty sure that the potential for a storm to generate lightning is strongly related to the CAPE (convective available potential energy), which is often measured by meteorologists using sounding balloons, or I presume, using more modern indirect (radar,lidar) methods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convective_available_potential_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convective_available_potential... I live in Florida, where we have a fairly high frequency of lightning strikes (although nothing like Congo). Here is a map of global lightning strikes per year per km^2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_lightning#/media/File:Global_Lightning_Frequency.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_lightning#/med... Whether a single rocket system would drain enough charge from a storm to prevent other lightning strikes, I don't know. I used to think about how to set up a continuous conduction path to the ionosphere as a form of power generation. Any material path would likely be destroyed, but in theory a stabilized plasma could provide essentially an unending lightning strike draining the global atmospheric charge imbalance. But, this isn't an easy problem (it's a long way up to the ionosphere), and the amount of energy in global lightning is surprisingly small when compared to other natural sources like solar, tides, geothermal, etc. Very concentrated though!

cmehdy 6y ago

> initiate lightning strikes by shooting rockets into clouds That's what should be shared when people think that science isn't heavy-metal enough.