Tom Warner, lightning researcher, talked through the old vs new way of understanding lightning, multiple attachments to spinning wind turbines turbines, upward vs downward lightning, how tall objects actually cause more lightning strikes, and more. Follow up with Tom on his website or watch slow-motion videos on his YouTube channel.
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Transcript – Tom Warner, Lightning Researcher
00:00:01:00 – 00:00:09:19
Unknown
I picture you and like your copilot, like in that scene in Caddyshack, just you’re getting pelted by three inch hail, you’re like, Well, I don’t think the heavy stuff is going to come down for quite some time now.
00:00:09:23 – 00:00:28:11
Unknown
Yeah, it was. It was pretty. It was pretty loud. In fact, they put a microphone right on the on the front of the canopy. We recorded two channels of audio, the pilot’s comments and then this other hail Mike, and that scientists could actually kind of gauge the size of the hail just from the loud loudness from that
00:00:28:11 – 00:01:01:06
Unknown
microphone. Welcome back. I’m Dan Blewett. I’m Allen Hall and I’m Rosemary Barnes. And this is the Up Time podcast bringing you the latest in wind energy, tech news and policy. All right. Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.
00:01:01:15 – 00:01:20:08
Unknown
I’m your co-host Dan Blewett. On today’s episode. We’ve got a great guest here today, a lightning expert. Tom Warner. So Tom has a really interesting background, which we’ll get into. He was also a pilot in the Air Force and flew this legendary aircraft that will get into a little bit called the T28 storm penetrating aircraft.
00:01:20:13 – 00:01:37:18
Unknown
And what this really means is that it was someone taking aircraft up into storms with the intention of seeing how they did getting struck by lightning, getting hit by a six inch hail. All this crazy stuff in the name of learning more about storms and lightning and how they all interact with planes.
00:01:38:02 – 00:01:51:04
Unknown
And also, he’s done a lot of research and photography, high speed video on wind turbine. So a lot of stuff that you’ll see in high speed video. You can see how lightning propagates the leaders. Lots of stuff that has never been seen before.
00:01:51:12 – 00:02:10:00
Unknown
So, Allan, give me a little more context into Tom because to say like, you’re a lightning expert, but Tom is like the lightning expert for lightning experts. Yeah, he’s a resource for a lot of people because he’s published so much and he’s been involved in lightning reaching up from towers, and it’s a whole series of papers and
00:02:10:00 – 00:02:28:19
Unknown
research. If you go to his website, you can download some of them or find out where you can get them that it was research oriented on wind turbines and also tall towers that were propagating leaders up into the sky and creating these thunderstorm lightning events.
00:02:29:04 – 00:02:50:04
Unknown
And also, I think it’s one of the early places that I saw where a lightning strike far down field can trigger reactions in the cloud and create the situation where these were tall towers. White light wind turbines can start reaching out to the sky simultaneously, and we’ve seen a lot more images like that in the last couple
00:02:50:04 – 00:03:11:14
Unknown
of years. Some of them from Tom, some from other researchers in the U.S. and Spain and around the world. But that knowledge of where things are happening in the cloud and it has an impact on the way lightning approaches, wind turbines and tall towers, and way lightning may attach the polarities just the different situations that may occur
00:03:11:14 – 00:03:25:04
Unknown
that I think in Tom’s neck of the woods, which is in South Dakota, a lot of lightning strikes on these tall towers are actually initiated by the tower or the wind turbine. And that changes the way we think about it.
00:03:25:06 – 00:03:41:13
Unknown
I think like airplanes, we used to think lightning just happened and we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, I think it collectively is changing now where we think that a lot of the lightning events are actually triggered by the turbines or towers because they’re so tall and they’re in the wrong place at the
00:03:41:13 – 00:03:59:09
Unknown
wrong time. So our thinking has evolved, and a lot of that is has come from Tom. I frequently his website and he has a really cool YouTube channel that has great information. If you if you watch those things, you can learn a lot because they’re in high speed video.
00:03:59:16 – 00:04:19:03
Unknown
You can learn a lot. But what’s actually happening on a wind turbine or tower in a lightning event? It’s fascinating. Really fascinating. Yeah, it’s interesting the idea that these tall objects and, you know, planes and space shuttles, that they’re causing lighting because you think, like you said, you think of it as you know, you’re walking through, you
00:04:19:03 – 00:04:30:10
Unknown
know, Miami and a coconut falls off a tree and hits you on the head. And that’s the end of you. That’s very bad luck. Kind of like getting hit by lightning, but it’s not really like that. It’s more like you’re going up and shaking upon a palm tree.
00:04:30:10 – 00:04:43:14
Unknown
And so then the coconut falls out. That’s kind of like what these tall towers are doing. Yeah, because they’re they’re they’re triggering more lightning, which is a really one of the many misconceptions that Tom will dispel right in this podcast.
00:04:43:14 – 00:04:57:05
Unknown
So, you know, it was a wide ranging topic, and for all of you listening, it’s you should stick around to the end because we get to the wind turbine specific implications for this towards the end of the show.
00:04:57:11 – 00:05:08:20
Unknown
He also gives a good foundation for what’s happening in lightning. So if you need a another dove into how it works and some again, some of the the way you learned it in school 2030 years ago might not apply today.
00:05:08:20 – 00:05:26:13
Unknown
So he’s going to kind of break some of that down, which admittedly can be tough. So we’re going to overlay a couple of video slides over on YouTube. So just kind of explain some of these concepts. But yeah, Alan, I mean, there’s still a lot to learn with lightning and but seeing some of this high speed super
00:05:26:13 – 00:05:37:05
Unknown
slow motion video that he has from his various camera setup around the world, you know, he’s been able to see stuff that was too fast for the human eye, right? Or all of human history until just recently with these new cameras.
00:05:37:19 – 00:05:52:00
Unknown
And and that’s really changed his view of lightning. And yeah, again, just broken down some myths that know we. We know this stuff is happening that we didn’t we assumed was not happening. But that’s right. And I think that that’s sort of the big one here.
00:05:52:00 – 00:06:08:12
Unknown
Is this the way lightning starts? We we don’t really understand what triggers lightning. What? Starts the whole process from happening has been a lot of discussion about cosmic rays, which may partially be true, but I think we’re evolving into thinking like the air is just breaking down by directionally.
00:06:08:12 – 00:06:21:18
Unknown
It’s nothing that was triggered on one side and then it goes to another side. What’s happening is we’re breaking down the air and we’re creating these leaders in the air without anything else happening, just the strong electric field and off it goes.
00:06:22:08 – 00:06:33:14
Unknown
That’s a different way of thinking about way lightning starts and we’re having because we have so many cameras around the world and we’re everybody’s photographing. And now the high speed cameras are much more available than they were even ten years ago.
00:06:34:16 – 00:06:48:12
Unknown
We’re getting more and more data, and Tom was sort of the initiator of some of that, particularly putting it online so we could see it. And without engineers need to see it before we believe it, we can read it in a book, but we really want to put our hands on it and see data.
00:06:49:05 – 00:07:06:00
Unknown
Tom was our data source and still is for that matter. So it really helps us, particularly wind turbines, helps us understand what is happening to some of these wind turbine lightning strikes. Yeah. And Tom’s, you know, again, that big journey to gather all this data for the good of all of us started up in the skies in
00:07:06:01 – 00:07:25:23
Unknown
a T20 eight, a storm penetrating aircraft, and it was a 1949 T 28 Trojan, which is a trainer or propeller. The old radial engine trainer used for both the Air Force and the Navy, and back in the seventies, the Soviets were claiming that they could modify the weather.
00:07:25:23 – 00:07:42:08
Unknown
So there was an effort on the U.S. to try to create a platform that could fly through storms and clouds and measure in situ. The micro physical things that are going on and to to verify if it was possible to modify the weather.
00:07:42:08 – 00:08:04:10
Unknown
So in the seventies, they, Paul McCreadie, came up with a design for modifying an aircraft that could survive a severe plane’s thunderstorm environment. And so they put armor plating on it. They put three quarter inch legs in bulletproof canopy modifications with metal reinforcement, and then they hung a hole.
00:08:04:11 – 00:08:20:10
Unknown
All these instrumentation instruments on the bottom of it so they could measure hydro meteors, which are particles either water ice from the millimeter size up to six inch diameter hail. And so this plane was one of a kind.
00:08:20:17 – 00:08:33:00
Unknown
It’s not a hurricane hunter because the hurricane hunters, they go over hurricanes that four engines and but they don’t get into the really heavy hail that we do get into the into the severe plant’s thunderstorms. So. So this thing was unique.
00:08:33:00 – 00:08:48:18
Unknown
Events modified heavily. It could. We also had a sniffer tube so we could measure oxides of nitrogen that had electric field sensors so we can measure to the electric field and all the thermodynamic parameters that you’d want to be able to measure.
00:08:48:18 – 00:09:04:22
Unknown
And so we flew it through thunderstorms and got into hail that made quite a racket. And we wish we would get struck by lightning, typically once a season as a single pilot. They took the back seat out and put the chemical sniffer in the back seat.
00:09:04:22 – 00:09:19:21
Unknown
So it was just, you’re there by yourself. Did you talk to a ground controller that’s looking at the radar, can see your position and is getting some telemetry data so they can tell if you’re in Hale or the environment that you’re in, but they also keep you safe.
00:09:19:21 – 00:09:34:06
Unknown
They tell you where to go if there’s a problem. And so it was it was to me, a dream job as a as a pilot, an atmospheric scientist, a lover of severe weather. You know, when when the chief pilot asked if I wanted to fly it, I was absolutely.
00:09:34:06 – 00:09:55:08
Unknown
And I was the only person that applied. And there’s actually two people that applied. And when the chief pilot called the other person and told him what he be doing, he withdrew his application. So that was it. But yeah, we’d get struck by lightning and we were, you know, the one most memorable lightning strike that attach to
00:09:55:08 – 00:10:13:09
Unknown
the propeller and the tail. And there’s always two attachment points because it actually initiates from the aircraft and propagates by directly bipolar and the lightning channel. one of the attachment points is on the propeller, and the sniffer tube that was measuring the oxides of nitrogen was on the top of the canopy, and it went right over to
00:10:13:17 – 00:10:29:08
Unknown
the sniffer team and got a great dataset and ended up in a publication. But when we land, we inspect the aircraft and there’s no burn marks and weld marks that took a little of the metal away from the propeller and in the tail.
00:10:29:08 – 00:10:42:07
Unknown
We file it out and they’d be ready to fly again. So I picture you and like your copilot, like in that scene in Caddyshack, just you’re getting pelted by three inch hail. You’re like, Well, I don’t think the heavy stuff is going to come down for quite some time now.
00:10:42:11 – 00:10:56:22
Unknown
Yeah, it was. It was pretty. It was pretty loud. In fact, they put a microphone right on the on the front of the canopy. We recorded two channels of audio, the pilot’s comments and then this other hail Mike and that scientists could actually kind of.
00:10:57:00 – 00:11:15:10
Unknown
Gauge the size of the hail, just from the loud loudness from that microphone. Well, before we get too deep, I kind of want to get you to go over just the basics. You know what lightning is, what lightning isn’t, because I know a lot of what’s taught still is kind of outdated and from old textbooks.
00:11:15:22 – 00:11:26:09
Unknown
So can you kind of give us a primer about all this stuff? You already alluded to a bunch of how you could feel, you know, like the charge building up and can you kind of take us through just the basics?
00:11:26:13 – 00:11:49:00
Unknown
Sure. I mean, I think the most fundamental thing you have to think about is how does the whole process start? And it starts with the electrification of a storm and the way a storm electrifies is that you have ice particles, what we call grapple, which is small hail, soft hail, and then you have ice crystals and these
00:11:49:00 – 00:12:03:00
Unknown
particles can collide. And when they do in the presence of super cooled liquid water. So we have to be in a temperature where it’s below freezing. There’s these droplets of water that are not frozen, even though it’s colder than freezing.
00:12:03:09 – 00:12:25:23
Unknown
And that’s that creates a rhyming scenario to where if any of those water droplets touch an ice particle, they’ll freeze instantly and create ice. So there’s a process that takes place that when these ice crystals collide with a grapple piece, a drop of electrons are transferred to the grapple and the grapple takes on a negative charge.
00:12:26:07 – 00:12:41:04
Unknown
The lighter, smaller ice particle tends then to take on a positive charge due to the deficit of electrons. And in the updraft then that separates it because it’s a lighter ice particle, so the ice particles collect in the upper part of the storm.
00:12:41:18 – 00:13:02:18
Unknown
The negatively charged grapple collects in the lower part of the storm because the larger size. And so a typical arrangement of charge in a thunderstorm is an upper positive charge region and lower negative charge region. And then for what we see over time is another lower positive charge region forms.
00:13:03:03 – 00:13:17:04
Unknown
And this is due to induction and a few other processes. So it’s really a triple type structure. This is your typical now. It’s much more complex than that, but that’s the basic. This ice is present no matter the ambient temperature that time of year.
00:13:17:06 – 00:13:33:22
Unknown
I mean, we’re talking about pretty high up in the sky, right? Right. It’s going to vary depending on the time of year. Obviously, in the summertime, you know, we’re looking at higher altitudes because of the warmer temperatures, and that’s why we flew around 20,000 feet in the thunderstorm in that storm plain because we were wanting that -10
00:13:33:22 – 00:13:47:21
Unknown
degrees Celsius, and that was around 19 to 20,000 feet in the winter months. That’s much lower. You can even get freezing down to the surface, but you don’t get that instability and you typically don’t get thunderstorms in the wintertime because of the cooler temperatures.
00:13:47:23 – 00:14:09:21
Unknown
So now we have this electrified storm. So what is lightning? What lightning? Is the development of a charged plasma channel? Essentially, it’s a it’s a hot, visually bright plasma channel where the neutral air of oxygen and nitrogen breaks down.
00:14:10:06 – 00:14:31:03
Unknown
And when we say break down, what that means is ionized so the air molecules have an electron rip off and then you’re left with a positive ion and. And the reason that happens is that you have these charge regions and there’s electric field between those two charge regions, and it’s gets so strong that you can get ionization
00:14:31:03 – 00:14:48:10
Unknown
of molecules, the neutral air and that causes separation. So you can think of it almost like a metal rod in the sense that it’s conductive. It’s it’s it’s got a plasma charged can move. It’s it’s very conductive and it develops in a bi directional bipolar fashion.
00:14:48:12 – 00:15:07:00
Unknown
And so think of it as just the air is breaking down under the intense force of the electric field. The actual mechanism that starts that initial breakdown is still being research. It’s not fully understood. We don’t know if it’s a cosmic ray that comes in and knocks off that first electron and then now that electron on the
00:15:07:00 – 00:15:22:02
Unknown
force of the electric field accelerates and causes an avalanche of collisions and other ionization. Or we don’t know if it’s an enhancement of of all these hydra meteors that enhance the field locally to create the conditions for the initial ionization.
00:15:22:02 – 00:15:39:11
Unknown
But we’re getting closer. But it’s one of those fundamental questions that are still not fully understood. So lightning is simply the development of a leader of a plasma leader that’s conductive. It’s hot and it’s grows in a bi directional bi polar region.
00:15:39:11 – 00:15:58:03
Unknown
So you have to have to charge regions for this to grow in between. So that’s how a lightning flash and it’s only leaders leaders can propagate and continue to propagate based on the difference in the potential or the charge on the tip of the leader and the charge region that’s in the storm.
00:15:58:16 – 00:16:17:06
Unknown
So if you think of the the negative end of the lightning leader, it’s got a surplus of electrons. So it’s it’s attracted towards the positive charge region. We have negative and positive, so it’s attracted to each other. And the negative end of the leader, which has a surplus of electrons, goes towards positive in the positive end of
00:16:17:06 – 00:16:31:05
Unknown
the year, which has a deficit of electrons, goes towards the negative charge region that has a surplus of electrons. And so it’s this difference in in charge that drives the leader and it causes further ionization on the tips.
00:16:31:06 – 00:16:49:15
Unknown
And that’s how it grows. So it’s ionization, the tips of the leaders that cause it to grow. As long as there’s a difference in the charge between the tip of the leader and the cloud charge, it’ll propagate. Once that difference decays, the leader just stops and then it cools down and the light goes away.
00:16:49:15 – 00:17:03:11
Unknown
And then those ions and electrons start recombining and you’re left with the neutral. But overall, what you’ve done, if you have these two charge regions and you have a lightning flash in between it, it shifts charge towards one direction.
00:17:03:12 – 00:17:23:22
Unknown
So in other words, the positive charge region, you’ll get a shift of electrons and in essence, you’ve reduced the charge because of that shift. And that’s what that’s what’s going on. So unfortunately for many years, it was thought that, you know, this charge in the cloud is like a water balloon and it can flow and you poke
00:17:23:23 – 00:17:40:17
Unknown
a hole in it and negative charge comes to the ground and strikes the ground. And that’s not true. It’s it can’t move like that. It’s on these little ice particles and it can’t flow on its own. And you know, you could you hear the analogy of a doorknob?
00:17:40:18 – 00:17:58:10
Unknown
Well, there’s the the charge in the cloud is not a doorknob. It would be really bad if it was because planes wouldn’t be able to fly and they’d hit it. But all these, all these little ice particles are like doorknobs, and they got charge on it and they can flow if they touch something, but they can’t move
00:17:58:10 – 00:18:17:16
Unknown
rapidly on their own. So that’s that’s a myth. Or a description that’s outdated in the case of lightning, you’ve either stays in the cloud and it moves by directly and stops as a cloud flash, but you could have one end of the leader come to the ground and there’s charge induced on the ground.
00:18:17:20 – 00:18:33:05
Unknown
The Earth is a fairly good capacitor or conductor in the sense that it can allow charge to move very freely along the surface. So if you have a negative end of a leader, go outside the cloud and start coming towards the ground.
00:18:33:05 – 00:18:50:20
Unknown
There’s going to be positive charge induced on the ground, and so it’s going to be attracted to the ground so that one end of the leader can go and make a connection with the ground. And when that happens, it causes what we refer to as a return stroke because suddenly you have this charged leader that’s that’s under
00:18:50:20 – 00:19:14:10
Unknown
a certain level of resistance touch a conductor that has very low resistance and the electrons rapidly accelerate downward. And that causes increased kinetic energy thermal zation. And you get this bright, hot return stroke that cascades back up the channel and kind of a wave and wave front due to the sudden increase or decrease in resistance.
00:19:14:10 – 00:19:26:05
Unknown
And that’s the return stroke. And that’s what we see as a really bright event that strikes the ground. But we can still see the leaders as they propagate through the cloud because we see clouds flashes, we see the leader.
00:19:26:05 – 00:19:43:18
Unknown
So we’re always seeing lightning, whether it touches the ground or not, we can see it. And so what’s the difference between upward and downward lightning? Because that’s definitely cause for concern because you think they’re going to go one way, like as a kid, you learn that they go down, but then you’re like, way that people confuse in
00:19:43:18 – 00:19:55:01
Unknown
the Adobe actually come up. You’re like, Well, which is it? I just want to look at lightning like, I don’t know. Yeah, you know, I was taught as a kid and most people come across as like, were I was taught, you know, lightning always goes up.
00:19:55:19 – 00:20:16:00
Unknown
And it’s true that the return stroke that I referred to goes up. It goes from the ground up because of that resistance decrease. But lightning, like I said earlier, is a bi directional bi polar process, and it can move and initiates up in the cloud except for upper lightning, which we’ll talk about later that propagates bi directionally
00:20:16:01 – 00:20:32:15
Unknown
and actually comes down to the ground to create a cloud to ground lightning flash. So it actually moves downward. It actually moves in both directions, both upward and downward, because there’s part of it that you got to think of lightning in terms of its both its ends.
00:20:32:15 – 00:20:49:11
Unknown
We’re just seeing that the lower end come below the cloud and come to the ground. There’s an upper portion that’s growing upward into the like the positive charge region. The negative end will go up the positive charge region and then you get to the positive and come down and vice versa, depending on the charge arrangement.
00:20:49:21 – 00:21:06:07
Unknown
So there’s always two ends of the lightning. And then when it touches the ground after it touches the ground, causes the return stroke, it can continue to grow as an attached channel further up into the storm. And that’s what we see is happening, and that’s essentially what our lightning is like.
00:21:06:08 – 00:21:25:03
Unknown
So the the process is straightforward in that regard, but really, lightning comes down from the ground, causes a return stroke, which goes back up the channel, and that’s where we were taught. Lightning always goes up because they’re referring only to the return stroke, but that’s not really true.
00:21:25:05 – 00:21:45:01
Unknown
It actually comes down. And the the most of the things we know about lightning have happened in the last 30 years. I would say when we knew that we could see lightning flashes and we photograph lightning flashes back in the twenties, 1920s and thirties and had a sense of what some of the basic physics were.
00:21:45:09 – 00:22:06:03
Unknown
I think just because of what we could record, but in the last several years, that’s really changed a lot because now I think our model has changed from sort of the Jordan model with a water balloon model to more of a global model of there’s charge entering the upper atmosphere out into space and then there’s a lightning
00:22:06:03 – 00:22:26:12
Unknown
flash down to Earth and and then the lightning can because it’s like a series of dominoes and these huge, massive charge centers in these clouds can you can get cascading things happening in the sky. And I think that’s one of the more interesting pieces we’ve we’ve stopped thinking about lightning as single events.
00:22:26:12 – 00:22:48:16
Unknown
We’re looking at more like a almost like a living breathing organism. It’s it’s in its nature. And you’re right, we still don’t really know what starts it, but we’re I think we do know more about the intricacies of how it how it travels, how it how it migrates, how the charge centers play into that.
00:22:48:22 – 00:23:09:08
Unknown
And one of the questions I always have is how when we start thinking about lightning globally. And where we’re trying to evolve that into I have a house where I have a tall building or have an airplane or I have a wind turbine.
00:23:10:05 – 00:23:29:05
Unknown
And how lightning starts makes a big difference onto what and how it develops in the cloud. And actually, it affects what happens to this device we’ve created and want to protect it. Walk us through a little bit of things because you do high speed photography, and I want to understand the high speed photography aspect of this.
00:23:29:14 – 00:23:51:23
Unknown
So let’s go first to that one. In the high speed photography, you started doing high speed photography before people started doing high speed photography. And at the same time, you’re putting it up on the internet and as engineers grinding away, trying to learn about lightning and at the time, design airplanes and wind turbines were just absorbing all
00:23:52:00 – 00:24:05:14
Unknown
the stuff because it’s so fascinating. We’ve never seen this before in this sort of resolution. What what drove you to to get to to do that? Well, what was the impetus to say, Hey, we need to be recording lightning or I’ll just take a camera out here and do it?
00:24:05:15 – 00:24:23:16
Unknown
You know, it really started back in. 2004, when I witnessed a spectacular upward flash, you know, I’d still been I had retired from the Air Force, the retired, the storm playing, so I wasn’t flying the storm plane anymore, but I was still very interested in severe weather and lightning in particular.
00:24:24:02 – 00:24:42:09
Unknown
And so I had a number of cameras, digital still cameras and standard video cameras that were always pointing towards storms in rapid city. I got a nice vantage point. And so I witnessed a spectacular upward flash in 2004 from the tower, one of the towers we have in Rapid City.
00:24:42:09 – 00:24:59:12
Unknown
We have ten towers and communication towers on a ridgeline that runs through Rapid City because it’s kind of the hub for the region. And I saw this thing and it was just blown away, and I wanted to understand it better, and I had the fortunate experience to work with a number of lightning scientists when I flew the
00:24:59:12 – 00:25:16:12
Unknown
T20. It was always a collaborative effort with all our research projects where we were working with lightning scientists and radar site, you know, the radar meteorology, all aspects of weather. So we really got to know each other. And so I reached out to them and I talked to them about it, and they helped me help guide me
00:25:16:12 – 00:25:43:01
Unknown
and mentor me into my research of lightning, specifically upward lightning and and really at that time frame. In 2004, there were scientists that were using higher speed cameras, up to 1000 images per second. Dr Bob Moser used them in the late nineties and then Myrcella Sava Dr Sola Saba in Brazil was using one that was 5000 images
00:25:43:01 – 00:26:08:16
Unknown
per second. But it really wasn’t. Known or shared much in the analysis and in the production of papers were still in the works and. As a photographer, I have a very strong photography hobby. In addition to my my flying and my severe weather interest, you know, after seeing that, I just wanted to experience in a better way
00:26:08:17 – 00:26:22:18
Unknown
. And it’s like this would be so neat to be able to slow it down. And how do I do that? So it took me about three years of research doing it with the standard speed cameras that I started learning more about the high speed cameras, the Phantom Vision Research, Phantom cameras.
00:26:22:18 – 00:26:40:20
Unknown
And then in 2007, I had heard that Tim Samaras was filming with high speed cameras, and he also got this camera. The Big Kahuna that was used for a nuclear explosion, photography. So he was an amazing engineer and I had a chance to just talk with him.
00:26:40:20 – 00:26:54:17
Unknown
And I said, You know, I know you’re getting into this lightning high speed lightning videography, and this is what I’m thinking. Do you think that’ll work? And he said, Yeah, that should work. And so we talked a little bit, and that’s when I got my first camera.
00:26:54:17 – 00:27:16:03
Unknown
So the difference was that, you know, I was more of an independent. I was able to purchase the cameras and do the cameras without restrictions from federal funding or anything like that. So I made that stuff available and much easier to access, which was my intent all along, is that I want to share what I learn and
00:27:16:03 – 00:27:36:22
Unknown
make it available because I think it’s important to learn and and and be educated about the world around us. And so I think that’s why, you know, my stuff became more and more prevalent was because I made it more easily available because there are a lot of restrictions to when you do federally funded projects on what you
00:27:36:22 – 00:28:00:22
Unknown
can do with with the data and such that you acquire and equipment that that’s purchased through those funds. So. But you know, after that, yeah, I think the photography aspect, my background photography really helped a lot because I had a perspective of creativity, understanding of the photography, and that really helped accelerate the use of high speed cameras
00:28:01:04 – 00:28:16:21
Unknown
. You know, we talked a lot among the scientists, the lighting scientists on how best to apply these and and and Marcello Sovereign and I really worked hard to do it in the best way possible to get the best data.
00:28:16:21 – 00:28:35:07
Unknown
And so we were kind of the focus on development of those techniques. And so that’s I mean, you’re talking about leaders and they’re maybe not quite as fast as the lightning stroke and cracked me up. I might be wrong there, but they’re very small and they’re harder to see, right?
00:28:35:07 – 00:28:53:01
Unknown
But those are a trickle along down the sky, almost like a like a dashed line on a map that’s exactly at the speed of of. The leaders are typically ten to the fifth meters per second. And as a scientist, you’re always thinking in those terms.
00:28:53:15 – 00:29:15:06
Unknown
So that’s why is it so you’re looking at ten of the fifth meters per second on that scale now, the return stroke is two orders of magnitude faster. The return strokes a third of the speed of light. And so when when that that wave of increased acceleration that goes up the lightning channel is incredibly fast.
00:29:15:06 – 00:29:29:17
Unknown
And so to order of magnitude faster and we’ve actually measured differences in the negative and the positive ends of the leader. And that is one thing that that I find most fascinating is the behavior differences between the negative end and the positive.
00:29:30:21 – 00:29:48:03
Unknown
The physics are different in that how the air breaks down, how the electrons are liberated and how the leader segments grow the negative and actually grows and steps. We call this what call the step leader. You might hear that a lot when it’s when we’re talking about lightning.
00:29:48:14 – 00:30:06:09
Unknown
The negative end grows in these these 50 meter steps in it. Actually, you have the tip of the negative leader. You’ll get a new segment grow and a bi directional bipolar segment will grow with the positive and coming back towards the established negative end of the leader and a negative end going forward.
00:30:06:15 – 00:30:25:18
Unknown
And it connects and suddenly produces a new 50 meter segment and it’s a bright attachment. And so that’s the step the positive in because electrons are coming in towards the tip of the positive leader. There’s again, there’s a deficit of electrons and they’re being driven this way.
00:30:26:04 – 00:30:41:15
Unknown
They tend to flow more smoothly. And so they tend to just kind of move in a continuous fashion without the stepping. There is some stepping that we’ve we’ve observed, but it’s much different. And there’s just these behavior, decent differences between negative and the positive ends.
00:30:41:15 – 00:30:55:10
Unknown
That, to me, are incredibly fascinating, and the whole behavior on the positive end is what causes the multiple stroke that we see on the ground. Most lightning ground flashes are negative, in other words, the negative end of the leader.
00:30:55:14 – 00:31:16:15
Unknown
Connects with the ground, but after that process occurs, you’re left with a growing positive leader and the positive leader does these things where branches will decay. They re eye and eyes and form what we call recoil leaders. These come back down the channel as a dart leader and cause multiple strokes, but only the positive end behaves that
00:31:16:15 – 00:31:37:14
Unknown
way. The negative end does its thing, but it’s much different and it’s very fascinating, and we’re still trying to understand that difference between positive and negative. It’s such a wide dynamic, and on airplanes, we notice it a lot in that the when you have bi directional leaders coming off airplanes, the positive end starts first and you actually
00:31:37:14 – 00:31:52:12
Unknown
have a positive leader moving probably hundreds of meters and then a negative one will come off the other end of the airplane somehow. So there’s just a totally different set of risks there. And on an airplane that it doesn’t matter all that much on things that are on the ground.
00:31:52:12 – 00:32:10:22
Unknown
It sort of does matter if it’s positive or negative in a sense, particularly like wind turbines, because we in a wind turbine, we don’t have a lot of real estate that’s actually conductive. There’s just maybe the tip. Maybe there come a receptors are on the blade that are made out of metal, and whether the blade is positive
00:32:10:22 – 00:32:25:19
Unknown
or negative has a big influence on on its protection effectiveness and that I think people have a hard time grasping that like if the clouds positive, the wind turbines negative, it means something different than if the cloud is negative and the blade is positive.
00:32:25:19 – 00:32:51:17
Unknown
It changes just the physics of the whole setup change. And because we we don’t know a lot about why the why we can see it. And fear in the laboratory, we can see it not like you can out in the wild, but we see the differences and but we because we’re we’re in a controlled environment in a
00:32:51:17 – 00:33:07:23
Unknown
lot of times and we’re actually looking at sorry application of lightning to products. We don’t see the full effect. Everything’s too close. We can’t generate the voltage of the cloud, right? We can’t generate the energy of a cloud and the voltage of a cloud simultaneously.
00:33:07:23 – 00:33:28:15
Unknown
So we try to work our way, engineering ways through that. But in the differences and positive negative, how? How much difference in the physics does it really make? Is it is it just, well, a negative sort of steps along and positive travels much more evenly?
00:33:28:21 – 00:33:48:16
Unknown
Are there other differences between positive and negative that we just are just really learning about now from mostly photographs? There is and what we see with upward lightning and upward lightning? No, it’s essentially a leader that initiates from an elevated object to building a tower wind turbine.
00:33:49:04 – 00:34:04:16
Unknown
It there’s an enhancement of the electric field locally due to the shape of the object. And so upward lightning, right? Instead of being a bipolar, bidirectional process, it’s a unipolar and it’s a one polarity that initiates from this object and goes upward.
00:34:05:09 – 00:34:26:16
Unknown
And this can happen from tall objects in two ways you can have lightning triggered up or lightning. And what that means is that there’s a there’s a normal downward flash nearby and that changes the electric field over this tall object and causes the initiation of of an upward leader so that lightning triggered upward lightning.
00:34:26:16 – 00:34:44:13
Unknown
Or you can have just that object initiate something on its own without any other preceding lightning. And that’s called self-initiated. And we see that more in the wintertime, when the cloud bases are lower and the charge is much closer to the tower, we’ll see that self-initiated and also relates to the wind speeds as well.
00:34:46:02 – 00:35:03:22
Unknown
So what polarity do we usually see? Well, it’s positive upward leaders, in other words, a positive leader, whether from wind turbines and tall objects much more often than a negative leader. And I’ve only witnessed a couple of upward negative leaders in all my research.
00:35:03:23 – 00:35:20:20
Unknown
It’s always been a positive leaders. And that has to do with the charge arrangement over the over the objects at the time of The Flash and the most prolific producer of upward lightning from tall objects or what we call mesoscale convective systems.
00:35:20:21 – 00:35:41:09
Unknown
And so these are very well-developed storms. These take hours to develop into the scale that we’re talking about, and you get this large convective leading edge and then you get a less convective. But still with a lot of rain, a lot of a lot of charge that falls behind it, and we call that the trailing strata form
00:35:41:09 – 00:35:59:21
Unknown
precipitation area. But what happens is that, you know, even though charge is being generated in the updraft and the leading edge, that charge gets ejected out and becomes a very strong layer of charge. So there’s a big table of charge over these tall objects and then you’ll get a flash.
00:36:00:06 – 00:36:18:16
Unknown
Mostly, most times it occurs in the convective leading edge, but the the leaders always go to where the charge is. They’re attracted to that charge, so they will follow these long pathways over this horizontally stratified charge and propagate over these tall objects.
00:36:18:16 – 00:36:41:06
Unknown
And it’s these typically it’s negative leaders that go over a large, horizontally stratified positive charge region. So we get this positive charge region in the trillions terraform over these tall objects, you get negative leaders that propagate over that, and that causes a very fast, intense electric field change.
00:36:42:04 – 00:36:59:08
Unknown
And due to the enhancement of the shape of the object, it causes an upward positive leader to rise up in response. And we’ve seen up to 14 wind turbines I’ve seen. Of those ten towers, I’ve seen nine of them light up in at one time in Rapid City.
00:36:59:13 – 00:37:14:11
Unknown
Wow, and they all rise up in response to this negative leader that’s going across. So that’s the triggering mechanism is the field change due to the triggering component, which is then the negative leader. So. So as far as the positive versus negative, we.
00:37:15:10 – 00:37:34:10
Unknown
You usually see positive leaders rise up from tall objects, wind turbines and such. And that has implications because like I mentioned before, positive leaders behave in a way to where they will branch and they decay, and then they develop the real eye and eyes on these decayed branches, which we call recoil leaders.
00:37:34:11 – 00:37:48:21
Unknown
And again, this is a bi directional bipolar process, right? And the negative end comes back down and follows the path the ground back to the back to the whereas initiated the turbine blade or the the point of the building, right?
00:37:48:21 – 00:38:05:03
Unknown
And it’ll do it multiple times. So it keeps getting these pulsing events that strike that object multiple times. And because it branches out in many directions and there’s such an area of charge, a large area of charge. These flashes tend to last longer.
00:38:05:17 – 00:38:21:22
Unknown
They generate more current spikes to the object in more detail. So it’s kind of like the worst case scenario, you know, you really don’t want to have that that scenario where you can sustain it for so long and have multiple pulses like that.
00:38:21:23 – 00:38:40:05
Unknown
But that’s the case. So that that’s a clear example of how the positive negative difference makes a difference in in wind turbines and in other objects, downward flashes. You can have negative or positive where the, you know, either negative leader comes out in a positive later.
00:38:40:06 – 00:38:55:10
Unknown
Normally it’s a negative end, but sometimes there can be a positive event. And in the trailing strata form precipitation area, there’s a lot of positive flashes. The positive cloud to ground flashes the lead, triggering flash for outward lightning.
00:38:55:19 – 00:39:07:21
Unknown
Because a positive end comes to the ground, the negative end is propagating through that negative charge region. There’s a return stroke, and then there’s a rapid development spread out of the negative leaders that causes the upward positive leaders.
00:39:07:21 – 00:39:30:08
Unknown
So positive CGS are the triggers. The most efficient triggers for over lightning went down, and they tend to also be very high current, high peak current and long continuing current. Sure, if you get a download attachment to a tall object, winter rain, the energies are much higher and so you can get more damage with just in the
00:39:30:08 – 00:39:48:19
Unknown
downward attachment with the positive side. So positive CG downward flashes can wreak havoc more so than the negative, and that has implications of from the just the scientific side of we’re really just learning about some of these lightning strikes and how powerful they are.
00:39:48:23 – 00:40:07:11
Unknown
I know there are certain places in the world like Japan off the coast of Scotland, Croatia and Turkey, and supports Turkey. The lightning strikes are just sometimes massively strong things, and you’ve photographed some of those or creative video videos.
00:40:07:16 – 00:40:27:01
Unknown
Some are some videos of some of these attachments in South Dakota, so there were some really interesting ones you published over last summer, and it speaks to what you were describing where there’s lightning reaching up for multiple wind turbines out to the sky, and then you have an attachment to one of them.
00:40:27:07 – 00:40:42:15
Unknown
one of them will take the attachment and you’ll just see multiple flashes occur as this as wind turbine is spinning. And such that the lightning actually follows the wind turbine blade through 30, 40, maybe 50 degrees of arc rotation.
00:40:42:15 – 00:40:59:15
Unknown
That’s a lot and hot blades, so it’ll jump from one place to another because, like you were saying, the lightning tends to want a pulse there, so it’ll flash on flash off. And in that off period, it just it just kind of hanging around, waiting for more energy to feed it.
00:41:00:00 – 00:41:22:04
Unknown
And maybe it jumps to the next blade. Maybe it doesn’t. But those are things that maybe ten years ago we thought didn’t exist much. And and now with some of the images you’re providing and others, it’s really making every at least our company go back and look and and say, OK, what’s really happening here?
00:41:22:04 – 00:41:40:04
Unknown
And as we’ve we as we continue to use sort of 1920 1930s data sets for lightning, that’s not what’s happening in South Dakota. The Switzerland Tower, Italy tower, all the things that were done early on, which are the foundation of all lightning protection today.
00:41:40:12 – 00:41:53:03
Unknown
Those are true. Those are all still true and they’re all still valid. But there’s other effects that are happening now. And so when you go out to video high speed video wind turbines, what are you expecting to see there?
00:41:53:03 – 00:42:05:14
Unknown
I mean, how do you know, like, tonight’s the night. I need to get out there tonight because this is the storm is there? Is there some part of that, like you can tell by the structure of the storm, this one’s going to be a big one weekend.
00:42:05:14 – 00:42:21:16
Unknown
I mean, it’s gotten to the point now where I can actually tell you when we’re in a zone that’s favorable for open lightning during a storm. And and we, you know. 80% of the time, that’s what happens or that’s when it happened, so, you know, like with anything, the more you watch it, the more you learn about
00:42:21:16 – 00:42:35:17
Unknown
it, the better you can understand it. And that’s, you know, I’ve been doing this, you know, for for many years. And you know, my colleagues and I can sit there and tell you the polarity and, you know, the behavior in real time.
00:42:36:00 – 00:42:50:16
Unknown
And that knowledge has come through the high speed analysis. But now it’s to the point where I can tell you, just by looking at real time, whether it’s negative, it’s positive. And it’s amazing it it’s slowed it down for us in our minds as we watch it.
00:42:50:16 – 00:43:10:23
Unknown
So. I’m looking for these mesoscale convective systems to form with a trailing strata formed precipitation area. When I see those, I go to any object that’s tall and Pawnee and try to fill, you know, Rapid City has some towers or some other big towers in western South Dakota.
00:43:11:00 – 00:43:23:05
Unknown
We now have this wind turbine farm. This was the first year that was operational. So this is why I got this word. It’s like, OK, first chance that I saw a storm that had the favorable characteristics and was likely to produce it.
00:43:23:06 – 00:43:38:21
Unknown
I went out there and sure enough, it produced our lightning, so I knew it was favorable. So I’m watching the storm dynamics. I also have the background to forecast using the models and have an understanding of wind storms will be favorable or conditions will be favorable.
00:43:39:09 – 00:43:53:22
Unknown
And then I can I can see the radar development and actually tell you, Yeah, this is doing what it needs to do to produce this type. You know, not all the time it happens. There’s there’s some there’s some aspects that I’m still not clear on is like, this was a perfect scenario.
00:43:53:23 – 00:44:09:22
Unknown
Why did it happen? And it has to do with charging charge levels and such that are just not optimum at that time. But yeah, so I I’m trying I can forecast when conditions are favorable. I can. I can tell that a storm is likely to produce it.
00:44:10:09 – 00:44:22:21
Unknown
And then when I go out to actually film it, it all depends on what I’m trying to observe. You know, sometimes I want a more wide field view and I want to watch the the triggering process where the leaders move over and cause the upwards.
00:44:23:02 – 00:44:37:17
Unknown
You know, I need a bigger picture on that. Sometimes I want to see more about the attachment and zoom in on the tower tip and see what’s going on if there’s attempted leaders prior to the initiation of a stream of leader transition.
00:44:38:23 – 00:44:53:21
Unknown
So it all depends on what I’m doing, and that also dictates the speed at which I’m operating the cameras. You know, these very fast processes. I have to be up in the 50,000 images per second range for the more big picture triggering process, 10,000 works for that.
00:44:54:02 – 00:45:09:02
Unknown
So it’s it all depends on what I’m trying to look for. But you know, this was the first year that I actually captured wind turbines where I saw that that arc. And essentially you have this system, this blade, it’s moving this way.
00:45:09:02 – 00:45:25:14
Unknown
It initiates an upper beta, it’s moving this way. And so there’s a luminous art that’s being left behind and then it cuts off and then the upward moving blade same channel. And then this portion decayed, the whole thing decayed.
00:45:25:14 – 00:45:47:16
Unknown
But then at a dart leader came down and it connected here. Yeah, rather than going that path. So it’s just a small matter of the decay, the cooling of the channel and what’s most favorable, right? Electrically, the electric field was enhanced and more favorable to attach when it came back down than it was to go over here
00:45:47:16 – 00:46:02:16
Unknown
. And this had decayed enough so that it was less conductive. And that’s the physics of that are really interesting because you’re not just looking at a sort of a stationary plasma channel that is still still getting blown by the wind you have.
00:46:02:17 – 00:46:14:07
Unknown
It’s more like being in an airplane and the way I see it as being an airplane, like when you see a wingtip get struck, you actually you feel like you’re dragging the lightning behind you. It’s following you. It has to follow you because you’re the conductor.
00:46:14:07 – 00:46:25:19
Unknown
Pass to where it needs to go. It is going to follow that. It’s going to follow that pathway until it no longer can. And if it can’t follow that pathway, it’s going to find another a new path way to go to.
00:46:25:19 – 00:46:40:20
Unknown
And that’s the blade hopping aspect of it, which is a completely set of different physics because they’re not only looking at the plasma of the channel and all the positive negative pieces of that and dart leaders on top of it.
00:46:40:20 – 00:46:58:19
Unknown
Now you’re looking at there’s a you’re in a windy environment. The Blades are moving at relatively high speeds, 200 ish miles an hour somewhere around the tips. So it becomes this really complicated physics problem that and you have the cooling of the channel, the plasma channels changing and then it’s growing, decreasing a little time.
00:46:58:19 – 00:47:14:06
Unknown
It’s like this living, breathing dragon out there. It changes everything. And I think what your videos are doing for the world right now is just giving us another perspective on it. Obviously, we can do a lot of things computationally with lightning, right?
00:47:14:11 – 00:47:31:09
Unknown
But what you’re seeing is some of that live action. Hey, this is what’s really happening. Data data set, which we, you know, we haven’t really had a, um, a good feedback loop here outside of what’s happened in the laboratory.
00:47:31:17 – 00:47:47:21
Unknown
And we’ve been very successful in the laboratory. We’re not as successful in the real world and your data is providing us the why and maybe not how it happened, but the why like, oh yeah, this is a lot different than what we planned for.
00:47:48:02 – 00:48:01:22
Unknown
Oh, OK, now we need to rethink about what’s happening and do we need a. Design lightning protection differently, knowing that it’s going to attach maybe multiple times that it’s it’s spinning and it’s moving, I mean, what are what are the implications?
00:48:02:01 – 00:48:12:09
Unknown
Yeah. And on an airplane, I think one of the interesting pieces on airplanes is, as Tom was alluding to earlier when he got struck and they are planning to hit the prop and then it went over his canopy.
00:48:12:18 – 00:48:29:21
Unknown
That same thing happens on commercial airplanes, right? So it starts at the nose and the lightning travels along the fuselage. There’s a lot of aerodynamics that happen in the middle of all that of where lightning will attach to and if it runs into things and you know, it gets the airflow shoves it around.
00:48:29:21 – 00:48:46:04
Unknown
And we’ve just sort of haphazardly say, Oh, it doesn’t really matter, right? It doesn’t make any difference, but it does. And particularly with winch and the correlation with wind turbines, airplanes are almost all conducted in that very few parts of an airplane that’s not conductive on a wind turbine is a very few parts that are conductive.
00:48:46:04 – 00:48:59:08
Unknown
It’s the opposite of an airplane. So what we’ve been taken for granted on airplanes for 100 years almost is now all of a sudden super important to us because we’re trying to control, we’re trying to control where lightning goes, right?
00:48:59:19 – 00:49:12:20
Unknown
The goal of a wind turbine is to manipulate the physics such that lightning only goes where we tell it to go. But lightning doesn’t want to behave that way, and it doesn’t want to do what you tell it to do.
00:49:13:04 – 00:49:32:03
Unknown
And part of that is a combination of the positive, negative aspects of it. The Dart leader part of this and what actually is happening up in the cloud as as charge centers get reached or breached, it’s changing what’s happening down at the bottom down here, which is us.
00:49:32:11 – 00:49:52:09
Unknown
And that’s that’s where I think our sort of fundamental understanding and what we think we can do control wise on lightning needs to be reevaluated. Absolutely. I mean it, I think to your point about the high speed video, what it’s done for us is a lot to allow us to see lightning like never before.
00:49:52:11 – 00:50:12:13
Unknown
And, you know, and we were able to see it in a way that the human mind can understand it sequentially in a video as opposed to these, these street cameras that were very hard to interpret. But they they were useful and analysis, and we can explain it in a way that we can understand and the general public
00:50:12:13 – 00:50:36:02
Unknown
can understand. So I think to your point about the high speed cameras, they’ve really. Furthered our understanding of lightning and our explanation of lightning, because you can see it, you can see that this is the process. You know, I alluded to the bipolar development of a lightning flash that we have video of the actual leader starting in
00:50:37:09 – 00:50:57:06
Unknown
clearer and it was near another channel that formed. And essentially it forms and you see the positive in bright right non-branded. You see the negative and highly branched stepping like I explained, and you see it grow by directionally and then the negative and actually attaches to the positive leader and forms a new branch.
00:50:57:06 – 00:51:17:11
Unknown
And to me, this is the most incredible observation because we’re actually seeing that leader form and that in that bipolar bidirectional process is confirmed and we can see it. And it’s very clear. And that was something that was proposed in the sixties and challenged very heavily for many, many years.
00:51:17:11 – 00:51:37:09
Unknown
Yeah, it was 20 years before that. That idea was was proven to be true, and now we can see it easily with the camera. So, you know, there’s a lot of aspects and you know, if we evolve our thinking and understanding through the use of these cameras, you know, and you have to I will say it can
00:51:37:09 – 00:51:57:15
Unknown
only you you only further your understanding when you combine these optical observations with the electric field measurements and then lightning mapping arrays and all the other observation techniques you use, you really need to use all of these in combination because we can’t see in the cloud, but we can map the lightning in the cloud and draw a
00:51:57:15 – 00:52:16:06
Unknown
picture of what’s going on, why we’re seeing the optical portion. So it’s important to that. There’s a lot of data collected in many different ways that allow us to improve our understanding. So. And Tom, I think the common conception the least this was mine is that, you know, the Earth just has X amount of lightning strikes.
00:52:16:06 – 00:52:34:18
Unknown
Obviously, like, you know, there’s storms everywhere around the world and when the, you know, when everything is right and then they happen. But you know, these wind turbines are actually causing more lightning than would otherwise be there if they weren’t erected on that mountaintop or in that field in the Midwest or out there on offshore is that
00:52:34:18 – 00:52:58:07
Unknown
that’s true. That because they’re there, they’re causing more lightning strikes, even more so than maybe a stationary building. It’s definitely true that we’re seeing more lightning created by objects that are manmade, you know? If those winter runs were not there, if those tall buildings were not there, when you have a triggering flash nearby, there would not be
00:52:58:07 – 00:53:15:00
Unknown
open lightning because there’s not the object that enhances the electric field. So you’re still going to get a naturally occurring lightning, the downward lighting. But we’re seeing additional lightning generated due to the addition of tall objects, winter turbines and tall buildings.
00:53:16:11 – 00:53:29:17
Unknown
I don’t know if there’s a difference in the percentage of the numbers between wind turbines versus tall objects because you can get very tall towers enhance the field greatly. And so they can produce a lot of upward lightning.
00:53:29:17 – 00:53:46:05
Unknown
You know, wind turbines tend not to be as tall as some of these, you know, thousand foot towers that you see for communication towers and those things light up. I mean, there was one well, the Toronto scene building and Toronto produced 35 upward flashes in one storm and 33 hours.
00:53:46:12 – 00:54:01:09
Unknown
So I mean, the numbers and I saw the same thing in Norman, Oklahoma. There’s a tower farm north of there, and I went down there and I filmed over 30 flashes in one night. So when you get those really tall towers, those things are prolific.
00:54:02:00 – 00:54:17:16
Unknown
The wind turbines being shorter, but the blade is moving. That enhances their effective height, if you will. And you have more of them so you can get, you know, that’s where I filmed these multiple things, where you can see, you know, ten wind turbines in one shot.
00:54:18:02 – 00:54:35:08
Unknown
So it’s it’s still it’s difficult to quantify if one is more effective than the other in producing Apollo. But we know that more lightning is being produced, the more taller buildings that we we recreate, and you can actually see this too in the lightning.
00:54:36:10 – 00:54:52:06
Unknown
Climate data or climatology data history data if you look, in fact, one of the tools that we use to determine if a f a tower is producing over lightning is we’ll look at the the density plots and you’ll see this peak of activity right where the tower is.
00:54:52:06 – 00:55:14:15
Unknown
And that tells you that there’s much more lightning occurring there. And it’s all these multiple strokes from the upward lightning flashes that increasing the density of flashes. It’s not because it tracks down or lightning more prevalently, because that’s a natural process and that that density is going to be uniform over the over the area.
00:55:15:02 – 00:55:26:23
Unknown
But if you see an enhancement right at the tower, that means it’s producing upward lightning because you’re getting more of these attachments. Well, Tom, as we wrap up here, I have two questions for you that I think everyone wants to know.
00:55:27:09 – 00:55:44:21
Unknown
one. Can you send us back in time? And two, do you own a DeLorean? I’m afraid the answer is no to both of them. Sorry about disappointing. Disappointing, disappointing. Make a more serious note. Where can people follow up with you on the web?
00:55:44:21 – 00:55:56:13
Unknown
I know you have a ton of videos, obviously on YouTube and you have your blog. Where can people learn more and see some of the stuff that we’re that we’re talking about the research, that blog as my as my blog.
00:55:56:16 – 00:56:19:22
Unknown
So that research is also my Twitter. Those are my two primary sources of reaching out to the community and sharing things. I do have a YouTube site that has both my lightning and and my just regular photography, landscape weather, photography, my atmospheric site, my atmospheric wildlife, if you will.
00:56:21:17 – 00:56:34:11
Unknown
That is on YouTube, and there’s links from my research blog that will get you there. So pretty much if you go to the ZT Research Dot blog, that’ll get you everywhere you need to go and then see me on Twitter.
00:56:34:17 – 00:56:48:04
Unknown
And as always, we’ll link to all that and the description below. Whether you’re on YouTube or Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, whatever, you’re listening. Tom, thank you again. So much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Well, I really appreciate the opportunity to share this with you guys and discuss this.
00:56:48:04 – 00:57:01:06
Unknown
This is fascinating things. Wind turbines. I’ve always been fascinated since I was a little kid with wind turbines and start to believe that I’m actually studying them and and the physics related to the Lightning in association with them.
00:57:01:06 – 00:57:14:08
Unknown
So again, I really appreciate the opportunity. All right. Well, again, we want to thank our guests, Tom Warner, for coming on the show with us today. You know, fantastic topic. And again, he’s essentially the lightning researcher for lightning researchers.
00:57:14:08 – 00:57:33:02
Unknown
So we really appreciate his work for just the greater good of all of us, whether it’s aircraft, travel and of course, keeping renewable energy like wind turbines going. So again, follow up with Tom at his website, which will link to in the description on this podcast, which is Z ZTE Research Dot blog and B.
00:57:33:02 – 00:57:42:17
Unknown
To be sure to send him a note and thank him for his time on the show and ask him any questions you might have, you can reach him through that website. So thanks again for listening. Be sure to subscribe.
00:57:42:17 – 00:58:04:01
Unknown
Share the show with a friend and we’ll see you here next week on the Up Time When Energy podcast. Operating a profitable wind farm is all about mitigating costs, minimizing risks and being efficient with maintenance repairs and upgrades.
00:58:04:14 – 00:58:24:04
Unknown
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00:58:24:04 – 00:58:40:09
Unknown
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