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Researchers explore how storms on Earth create extreme bursts of radiation

nature.com

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Re: Researchers explore how storms on Earth create extreme bursts of radiation

#11

Post by FiatLuxDave »

Shivetya wrote: post #8
FiatLuxDave wrote: post #4

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 se…

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?

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...

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#/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!

Re: Researchers explore how storms on Earth create extreme bursts of radiation

#12

Post by maxerickson »

Double_Cast wrote: post #9
maxerickson wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want to figure out the details of why and how it happens.

I think snarfy is expressing incredulity that meteorology doesn't already account for these types of emmissions. Analogously, suppose the headline had read > Water flows downhill. Scientists want to know why. "But gravity makes everything flow downhill, right? What makes water especially worthy of investigation." Surely this is a reasonable reaction.

We don't entirely have a mechanistic explanation for gravity either.

Re: Researchers explore how storms on Earth create extreme bursts of radiation

#13

Post by temp0826 »

swayvil wrote: post #7

I heard that lightning is triggered by cosmic ray particles. A seed in a supersaturated solution situation. And cosmic rays always come from very very far away. So a lightning bolt is literally an amplified message from beyond.

I don’t think that’s always the case as it doesn’t really account for ground-to-cloud lightning strikes

Re: Researchers explore how storms on Earth create extreme bursts of radiation

#14

Post by cmehdy »

FiatLuxDave wrote: post #4

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 se…

> initiate lightning strikes by shooting rockets into clouds

That's what should be shared when people think that science isn't heavy-metal enough.

Re: Researchers explore how storms on Earth create extreme bursts of radiation

#15

Post by swayvil »

temp0826 wrote: post #13
swayvil wrote: post #7

I heard that lightning is triggered by cosmic ray particles. A seed in a supersaturated solution situation. And cosmic rays always come from very very far away. So a lightning bolt is literally an amplified message from beyond.

I don’t think that’s always the case as it doesn’t really account for ground-to-cloud lightning strikes

Well I dunno about "always the case", but it's certainly accountable for ground-to-cloud.

What the seed does is create a place of high potential. I think which way the lightning flows is arbitrary at that point.

Re: Researchers explore how storms on Earth create extreme bursts of radiation

#18

Post by pbuzbee »

Cool to see this on HN! I worked for Prof. Smith (quoted in the article) as an undergrad. TGFs also emit beams of electrons. One of my projects was investigating whether we can detect these beams of electrons bouncing back and forth along Earth's magnetic field lines.

Re: Researchers explore how storms on Earth create extreme bursts of radiation

#19

Post by spijdar »

maxerickson wrote: post #12
Double_Cast wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think snarfy is expressing incredulity that meteorology doesn't already account for these types of emmissions. Analogously, suppose the headline had read > Water flows downhill. Scientists want to know why. "But gravity makes everything flow downhill, right? What makes water especially worthy of investigation." Surely this is a reasonable reaction.

We don't entirely have a mechanistic explanation for gravity either.

Yeah, I'm not a physicist sort, so I wouldn't know, but I was under the impression that while we have a good model for the "what" of gravity in most "classical" scenarios, and we can even model some weird gravity effects in weird situations, not all of the "whys" are answered and people don't know how to model gravity together with other phenomena.

Re: Researchers explore how storms on Earth create extreme bursts of radiation

#20

Post by dms_ucsc »

pbuzbee wrote: post #18

Cool to see this on HN! I worked for Prof. Smith (quoted in the article) as an undergrad. TGFs also emit beams of electrons. One of my projects was investigating whether we can detect these beams of electrons bouncing back and forth along Earth's magnetic field lines.

Hi, Paul! :) I was sent here by Greg Bowers. -David
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