Laser Triggers Electrical Activity In Thunderstorm 167
esocid writes "A team of European scientists has deliberately triggered electrical activity in thunderclouds for the first time 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 filaments that could conduct electricity. No air-to-ground lightning was triggered because the filaments were too short-lived, but the laser pulses generated discharges in the thunderclouds themselves up to several meters long. Triggering lightning strikes is an important tool for basic and applied research because it enables researchers to study the mechanisms underlying lightning strikes. Moreover, triggered lightning strikes will allow engineers to evaluate and test the lightning-sensitivity of airplanes and critical infrastructure such as power lines. Research into laser-triggered lightning has been going on for some years. Until now, no experiment was able to produce a long enough plasma channel to affect the electrical activity inside clouds."
Electricity source? (Score:4, Interesting)
Lightning rocketry (Score:5, Interesting)
Weather Machine (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Electricity source? (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with my sibling comments that this is almost certainly infeasible. Storage would be a nightmare, trying to suddenly absorb all that energy.
However, the first thing that came to my mind was radio. Protecting antennas (especially the large ones like AM broadcast) I'd imagine is quite tough and expensive. You are going to take hits, and you have to have everything designed to deflect as much energy as possible. You obviously don't want your millions and millions of dollars of equipment getting fried. The insurance on all this can't be cheap.
Yet if you could use a laser to drain local clouds near your antennas... you might be able to seriously mitigate possible strikes or at least the damage they might cause.
Heck, if you could make this really cheap (obviously difficult, especially given laser power requirements) you could protect kids sports events and such that might otherwise get cancelled.
In the midwest, sudden and STRONG thunderstorms are quite normal during parts of the year. I could see this being useful.
Heck, synch the pulses up to the local radio station as an advertisement. "LAZR 102.7, now protecting you from lightning. Shows start when the thunder does!"
(be afraid of NPR pledge drive week)
Re:Lasers again. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Electricity source? (Score:3, Interesting)
No, the issue with supercaps isn't voltage, when it comes to cars. (I'll ignore catching lightning; it's a bad power source for lots of reasons.) A few in series gets into the range that power electronics can work with easily enough. No, the problem with supercaps is that they're still heavier than even lead acid batteries, and expensive. They're getting cheaper and better, though -- and last I looked into it, there were pieces of them in labs that were competitive with batteries. The best ones I've found that you can buy are about 1/10th the energy density, which is tantalizingly close.
I'm hopeful we'll see them beginning to appear in commercial applications in a few years, though I imagine the first place they get used won't be cars. If they can compete on weight with batteries, you could imagine charging your cell phone / iPod / laptop in a tenth the time it currently takes...