What Initiates Lightning?
Abstract
Lightning is an energetic electric discharge, creating a current that flows briefly within a cloud--or between a cloud and the ground--and heating the air to temperatures about five times hotter than the sun’s surface. But there’s a lot about lightning that’s still a mystery. Los Alamos National Laboratory is working to change that. Because lightning produces optical and radio frequency signals similar to those from a nuclear explosion, it’s important to be able to distinguish whether such signals are caused by lightning or a nuclear event. As part of the global security mission at Los Alamos, scientists use lightning to help develop better instruments for nuclear test-ban treaty monitoring and, in the process, have learned a lot about lightning itself.
- Publication Date:
- Research Org.:
- Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Org.:
- USDOE
- OSTI Identifier:
- 1369034
- Resource Type:
- Multimedia
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
- Subject:
- 73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS; 54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; 46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY; LANL; LIGHTNING; COSMIC RAYS; ELECTRIC FIELDS; SEVERE WEATHER; WEATHER PREDICTION
Citation Formats
. What Initiates Lightning?. United States: N. p., 2017.
Web.
. What Initiates Lightning?. United States.
. Tue .
"What Initiates Lightning?". United States. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1369034.
@article{osti_1369034,
title = {What Initiates Lightning?},
author = {},
abstractNote = {Lightning is an energetic electric discharge, creating a current that flows briefly within a cloud--or between a cloud and the ground--and heating the air to temperatures about five times hotter than the sun’s surface. But there’s a lot about lightning that’s still a mystery. Los Alamos National Laboratory is working to change that. Because lightning produces optical and radio frequency signals similar to those from a nuclear explosion, it’s important to be able to distinguish whether such signals are caused by lightning or a nuclear event. As part of the global security mission at Los Alamos, scientists use lightning to help develop better instruments for nuclear test-ban treaty monitoring and, in the process, have learned a lot about lightning itself.},
doi = {},
journal = {},
number = ,
volume = ,
place = {United States},
year = {2017},
month = {5}
}