Latest Lightning Stories

By Jay Clarke, The Miami Herald May 25--A blue moon, a green flash, rogue waves and ball lightning. You might never encounter these rare natural phenomena during a trip, but then again, you never know. I have witnessed all of those during my travels, as well as other unusual phenomena, and so might you. Take the green flash. Many people believe it's a myth. But it's a very real occurrence, and I've seen it on three different occasions. And while the existence of rogue waves and ball...

A monster storm spawning bolts of lightning 10,000 times more powerful than any seen on Earth is raging on the ringed planet Saturn. The powerful electrical storm cropped up in Saturn's southern hemisphere five months ago, when it was first spotted by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, and has persevered to become the planet's longest continuously recorded tempest to date. "We saw similar storms in 2004 and 2006 that each lasted for nearly a month, but this storm is...

PASADENA, Calif. "“ As a powerful electrical storm rages on Saturn with lightning bolts 10,000 times more powerful than those found on Earth, the Cassini spacecraft continues its five-month watch over the dramatic events. Scientists with NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission have been tracking the visibly bright, lightning-generating storm--the longest continually observed electrical storm ever monitored by Cassini. Saturn's electrical storms resemble terrestrial thunderstorms, but on a much...

Scientists have triggered the electrical precursors to lightning with lasers aimed at thunderstorms for the first time, a new study reports. In a modern-day version of Benjamin Franklin's famous kite experiment, the scientists placed a mobile laser at the top of New Mexico's 10,500-foot South Baldy Peak and shot laser pulses at two passing thunderstorms, generating electrical activity in the clouds. Franklin proposed an experiment to use a key attached to a kite to trigger...

Device on mountaintop takes first step toward manmade lightningA team of European scientists has deliberately triggered electrical activity in thunderclouds for the first time, according to a new paper in the latest issue of Optics Express, the Optical Society's (OSA) open-access journal. They did this by aiming high-power pulses of laser light into a thunderstorm. At the top of South Baldy Peak in New Mexico during two passing thunderstorms, the researchers used laser pulses to create plasma...

University Park, Pa. "“ The mechanism behind different types of lightning may now be understood, thanks to a combination of direct observation and computer modeling reported by a team of researchers from New Mexico Tech and Penn State."Our explanation provides a unifying view of how lightning escapes from a thundercloud," the researchers report in the April edition of Nature Geoscience.Most people see lightning strikes that go from clouds to the ground, but some lightning goes...

Thunder rumbles in the distance as darkening clouds gather above NASA Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39B, where a sleek Ares I launch vehicle stands awaiting an upcoming flight. A blinding lightning flash suddenly streaks down from the sky, striking one of the pad's tall steel masts. The surge of electrical current quickly is diverted away from the rocket and carried safely into the ground.This scenario hasn't happened yet; the Ares I rocket is still in development, and NASA is just...

Venus is a hellish place of high temperatures and crushing air pressure. The European Space Agency's Venus Express mission adds into this mix the first confirmation that the Venusian atmosphere generates its own lightning. The discovery is part of the Venus Express science findings that appear in a special section of the Nov. 29 issue of the journal Nature. "In addition to all the pressure and heat, we can confirm there is lightning on Venus -- maybe even more activity than there is here...

Earth: water planet. Oceans, rivers, aquifers, rain: these and many other features describe the hydrologic anatomy of Earth's thin, life-supporting layers of upper crust and lower atmosphere. How it works"”that is, how water circulates, behaves, and interacts is much harder to determine. That's why there's TRMM, and this year NASA celebrates the tenth anniversary of this one-of-a-kind spacecraft. Built in cooperation with the Japanese Space agency JAXA, The Tropical Rainfall Measuring...

A NASA-supported study has introduced a new way to detect lightning outbreaks inside a hurricane from thousands of miles away, giving forecasters new insight into just how powerful an oncoming storm will be. As a result, researchers can now investigate with greater accuracy how the rate of lightning strikes produced within a hurricane's eyewall is tied to the changing strength of that hurricane. A hurricane's eyewall is the inner heat-driven region of the storm that surrounds the "eye" where...