3 ms·

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.

• 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!