"Capturing' Lightening on Science Daily!

From Science Daily is this "enlightening" article about fascinating new ways to study lightning! Here's more about this amazing study:

"...First you see it ... Then you hear it! But how much do you know about it?

Storm chaser Lee Nichols, says, "Every now and then you see one that just starts from the middle of the sky and completely covers everything. Fascinating." When he sees clouds roll in, he rolls out! "We have punched a core of a storm, which means driving right through it -- in what's called a bear cage -- and lightning is just bouncing around all over the place," he tells Ivanhoe. "You're inside like looking out of lightning bars," he says.

But as close as we can get to it, there's still a lot we don't know about it. Martin Uman, a professor at University of Florida Lightning Research Group in Gainesville, Fla., says, "One of things we're trying to do now is understand how it strikes the ground -- how it strikes what it strikes."

Engineer Martin Uman and physicist Joe Dwyer are trying to crack the code and increase safety. Joe Dwyer, a physicist at University of Florida Lightning Research Group, says: "If you are a power company, you've got to make sure that lightning is not going to strike one of your poles and cause a blackout. You got to make sure that if lightning strikes your aircraft that you're not going to get people killed."

The two are literally capturing lightning. They launch a rocket with a wire connected to it out of tubes and into the sky. The rocket snakes its way up to the cloud, finds the charges in the cloud, and then brings the lightning down to the researchers.

Dwyer says they've learned lightning doesn't come straight down to the ground. It does so in a series of discrete steps."

Read the rest of the article on Science Daily here.