A small group of undergraduate students are working to find a way to track exactly where lightning originates in storms. It all began with a cattle prod to generate electrons in the laboratory. Now the students are putting together a sensor that can locate the stream of electrons in the 50 to 340 megavolt range. They will use that to better understand what is going on in a storm that contains lightning and what frequencies are best for tracking the electrical activity.
Photo (l. to r.): Barry Crow, Daniel McClure, Corrina Hoffman and Thomas Christian.
They hope to complete a prototype that can measure lightning in the vicinity of their lab in the next few weeks. This project will involve more than one generation of UNM students. Most of the students working on the prototype graduate in May and will have to hand their project over to a new group of students who will test the prototype in real conditions during New Mexico’s monsoon season over the summer.
If all goes well, students at the Configurable Space Microsystems Innovations & Applications Center (COSMIAC) will build more sensors and begin spacing them so they can work together to pinpoint the origin of lightning in an electrical storm.
The long term goal of the research is to find a way to equip a small satellite and have it work in conjunction with ground sensors to give researchers a fix on where conditions are right for producing lightning. The research is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under an American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) grant.
Media Contact: Karen Wentworth, (505) 277-5627; e-mail: kwent2@unm.edu