Taking a photo of a lightning takes extreme patience and high-tech camera equipment. However, successfully capturing lightning is well worth it.
Now, researchers also capture lightning, but using a method way different than photography. It turns out that lightning can be used to shed light on storm cell behavior, which gives forecasters new tools for predicting lightning hazards, as this new study showed.
The new technique is "essentially lightning-based tomography, similar to a medical X-ray," said Michael Peterson, an atmospheric physicist at Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico and author of the new study, published in AGU's Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.
"Using lightning flashes as the light source, we can identify contrasts in cloud layers that are indicative of dense regions, such as ones that might be laden with hail," he said.
Peterson drew upon data gathered by the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) on NOAA's GOES satellites. The GLM was designed to measure total lightning activity and provide that data to forecasters in real-time, but the products used in operations are only a small portion of GLM's capabilities.
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This deeper dive into the GLM data can also help identify storm systems that may produce especially dangerous lightning, like horizontal flashes that can seem to strike out of the blue, Peterson said.
More details of this one over at PHYS.org.
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