Pretty neat overall. I thought this was an interesting random fact:<p>> The key role of ice crystals dovetails with recent findings that lightning activity dropped by more than 10% during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers attribute this drop to lockdowns, which led to fewer pollutants in the air, and thus fewer nucleation sites for ice crystals.
I just love how perfectly this squeaks more science out of an existing investment with seemingly no ill effect on its intended use. I imagine there will be lightning studies out of this observatory for decades.
is this still the case when you get lightning triggered from large amounts of smoke in wild fires? i’ve seen footage of fires in australia where the smoke becomes so big it starts to cause it’s own lightning
Makes me remember when the CIA considered using lightning as a killing weapon...maybe they're watching closely now<p><a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a34100542/cia-considered-using-lightning-as-weapon-declassified-documents/" rel="nofollow">https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a34100542/...</a>
The clickbait headline belies the content of the article: researchers still don’t know exactly what triggers lightning.<p>Personally I find the leading hypothesis a bit absurd or at least unbelievable. The idea that colliding ice crystals shed electrons and form ionized air in masses great enough to trigger the most energetic phenomenon on the plant seems … like a Newtonian hammer looking for a nail.<p>It’s well known that the sun emits a powerful electric field which causes the “northern lights” to appear at the poles of the planet. And it’s well known that solar activity is correlated with large scale weather patterns and atmospheric thermodynamics.<p>How is the Sun not a viable explanation for the origin of lightning? Cosmic rays initiating an electron cascade is interesting, but I would expect the sun to play a bigger role than that.
Last summer, we walk half way around the LOFAR superterp and along some other LOFAR stations in the area. It is in a rather quiet nature reserve. I recognized the roads we walked in the back ground of the animation, which is from a point in the sky looking down towards earth.