stroke of luck
Most movies start with an ‘establishing shot’ to put things in context, so I’ll ask you to recall the illustrations you probably saw years ago of the American scientist Benjamin Franklin. Because it was he who in June 1752 carried out a famous experiment in which he successfully created electric sparks from a key attached to the conducting string of a kite that was insulated from the ground with a silk ribbon.
oh lucky man
Franklin was a doubly lucky man, lucky once that he didn’t commit suicide in an experiment that we know to be very dangerous (he didn’t know that). He too was lucky that his name became inextricably associated with this trick, as the same experiment had been carried out a month earlier in France at the behest of the naturalist Thomas-François Dalibard. Franklin, of course, was unaware of Dalibard’s work and developed his research to a greater degree of perfection. The lightning rod for the protection of structures was just his idea.
Franklin expounded and documented his findings in great detail, which is more than can be said for ‘maverick genius’ Nikola Tesla, born in Serbia but resident of the US for most of his life. Tesla’s works, which are still shrouded in mystery to some degree, took off in the 1880s after he was seized with the notion of transmitting electrical power on an industrial scale without using wires. His idea was to harness the immense power of lightning and distribute artificial lightning to consumers through the air.
dubious sanity
It is at this point that a saying of Robert Frost comes to mind, namely that ‘A civilized society is one that tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity’. In 1899, Tesla’s laboratory created a high-frequency AC generator more than 16 meters in diameter that generated 300,000 watts of power and produced artificial lightning bolts 40 meters long.
So far, so good, but after this, he set out to supply homes with what he called “cosmic power,” electrical forces from Earth’s upper atmosphere that could be collected by spherical antennas on each roof. His experiments in this regard ceased in 1905, after which he turned his attention to the creation of a “peace ray” that would end the war through the use of “macroscopic particle beams” which he termed “teleforce”.
practical purposes
The skies have not yet been collected, although atmospheric electricity has frustrated many other projects. The wire antenna that the Laser 558 offshore radio station tested in 1984 was a good example. The intention was for a helium balloon to keep the antenna vertical, but this continually failed as a result of atmospheric electricity. Ultimately, the station opted for a conventional T-antenna strung between a pair of 100-foot masts.
According to ‘The Weather Channel’, we know a lot more about what doesn’t work than what does when it comes to harnessing lightning. Their severe weather expert, Dr. Greg Forbes, admits that scientists have yet to determine what a practical method would be. “It’s hard to get a single geographic location that is struck often enough to actually generate electricity,” he says, “and each lightning strike is so short-lived that you would need a large number of them to get a useful amount of power.” Energy. It’s a good experiment, but not realistic.
However, scientists are still studying lightning. The US space agency NASA believes that researching lightning will give it a better idea of how the atmosphere as a whole works. By characterizing the electrical behavior of storms, NASA can advance the search for more accurate forecasts, which has positive ramifications for emergency planning and preparedness. New Scientist magazine recently reported that scientists in the US believe it is possible to predict the volume of water stored in a thundercloud simply by recording the number of lightning strikes it produces. Studies involving satellites indicate that it is the amount of ice within a cloud that determines the amount of lightning produced. The next task is to correlate this figure with the volume of rain that is likely to follow.
unfortunate blow
There is an old saying that lightning never strikes the same place twice. If this were the case, insurers would pay much less money in compensation, but the truth is that lightning strikes the easiest path to earth, whether or not it struck before. The Association of British Insurers has been looking at the frequency and severity of lightning in relation to climate change and has concluded that the total number of lightning strikes per year will remain the same.
As reassuring as this may or may not be, there are many organizations that need to know about today’s lightning strikes: broadcasters, rail operators, and electricity supply companies. This is why EA Technology’s research center in Capenhurst, Cheshire, operates a lightning location system that allows subscribers to view the location of lightning strikes anywhere in the UK and the north-west coast of continental Europe. on their PC screens. By recording particular lightning damage hotspots over a period of time, users can refine the effectiveness of their protection systems, leading to better investment policy decisions down the road.
The mechanisms for providing this information are extremely elegant, not only because of the advanced technology used, but also because of the ingenious way in which the process alerts users only to harmful lightning strikes. It achieves the ultimate by locating only cloud-to-ground lightning strikes; its main objective is to assess, locate and predict the damage that has probably occurred. These cloud-to-ground strikes make up one-third of all lightning strikes (the remaining two-thirds occur within or between clouds).
natural waveguide
Lightning is detected by direction-finding techniques at the extra-low frequency (ELF) of 1.1 kHz, the frequency at which the earth’s surface and ionosphere work together to create a “natural waveguide” that propagates ground waves alone. Because there are no interfering sky waves at these operating frequencies, the headings produced are more accurate than in conventional systems, and mainly horizontally polarized radiation from impacts between and within clouds is not recorded at all, unless you are very close to a direction finder. station (within 30 km).
At ground stations across the country, the analog signals from the DF antennas are amplified, filtered, and converted into a heading and force value. The data is then sent as a digital signal via permanent landlines to Capenhurst, where the strike is recorded and its position triangulated. With data from several base stations to compare, spurious signals caused by local interference can be rejected and genuine thunder can be triangulated anywhere in mainland Britain; often with an accuracy of less than a kilometer.
Lightning fast!
Each incident is tracked and stored along with its time and other data in the computer mapping system. Subscribers can watch an approaching storm track live on their PCs. Each new hit appears on the screen a few seconds after it occurs. In fact, it’s possible to see a flash in the sky and see the data hit the screen at lightning speeds, before you hear thunder!
