On March 26, 2004 I captured a spectacular upward lightning flash from a tower in Rapid City, South Dakota. Little did I know that this flash would “spark” a 20+ year research effort to better understand this rare but important type of lightning.
As a research scientist at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, my job was to pilot the National Science Foundation funded T-28 Storm Penetrating Aircraft on severe weather research missions. I had this job from 2000 until the aircraft was retired in 2003. You can now see it at the National Weather Museum and Science Center in Norman, Oklahoma. In 2003, I also completed my master’s degree in Atmospheric Sciences at SDSMT and published a American Geophysical Research Letter using data collected by the aircraft.
During my time piloting the T-28 I had the privilege of working with scientists from across the country on collaborative severe weather research. Notably, we worked with the lightning scientific community to correlate lightning mapping array (LMA) data with the electric field meter measurements recorded on the T-28. I met the team at New Mexico Tech, namely Dr. Paul Krehbiel, Dr. Ron Thomas, and Dr. Bill Rison who helped us work with the LMA data they recorded. In addition, I got to meet radar meteorologists, microphysical and cloud physicists and thermodynamic experts and modelers from other institutions during our deployments. Since my masters thesis involved modeling airborne electric field measurements made by the T-28 with an actual lightning channel recorded by the LMA during the Severe Thunderstorm Electrification and Precipitation Study in 2000, I became especially interested in lightning physics.
So back to the upward flash I recorded on March 26, 2004. I reached out to Dr. Phil Krider at the University of Arizona, and he explained that I had captured upward lightning. For some reason, I thought it would have been recorded by the National Lightning Detection Network as a positive flash given it was so bright, but he stated that most upward lightning flashes are negative (negative charged transferred to ground due to positive leaders growing upward) and the National Lightning Detection Network data backed up his assessment.
I was hooked.
I wanted to learn everything I could about this type of lightning so I found and read as many sources on the subject that I could. As well, I began developing a plan on how to make scientific quality observations of future upward flashes since the towers in Rapid City were clearly able to generate them, and I lived in a favorable location to monitor them. I purchased GPS time code generators so I could capture video with 1 second accuracy. I also mounted a number of cameras on my house to observe the 10 tall towers that stand along the ridge that runs through Rapid City. Additionally, I purchased an electric field meter.
From 2004 – 2007 my observations were limited to standard definition video cameras recording at 60 fields per second and still image cameras. You can see some of my early instrument setups in the pictures below.
I managed to record upward flashes in 2004 and 2005 but missed the only upward lightning producing storm in 2006. In 2007, I wondered if I could capture lightning with a high-speed camera, and after talking with Tim Samaras at the annual storm chaser convention that year, was convinced I could. Therefore, I purchased a used Phantom v7.1 high-speed video camera in 2007 and made my first high-speed recording that year. Even though I was able to capture some spectacular negative and positive cloud-to-ground (CG) flashes in 2007 including a downward flash that struck one of the towers in Rapid City, I did not capture any upward flashes.
It was not until 2008 that I made my first high-speed recordings of upward flashes and the results were stunning to see. Since using high-speed cameras, I have often stated that capturing a lightning flash with a high-speed camera is like creating a novel. Witnessing the flash in real time creates the title for example, “A Multistroke Ground Flash that Flickered a Couple Times.” However, when you play back the high-speed camera recording, it becomes a novel with multiple chapters and interesting twists, turns and plot variations that play out over the lengthy recording. A descending channel may branch with some branches decaying and then rebrightening. The return stroke may suddenly brighten the channel saturating the entire image and then decay before a fast dart leader progresses down the decayed return stroke leader causing another return stroke. Each event is its own chapter on lightning physics. For perspective, a 1 second recording captured at 10,000 images per second will take 5 1/2 minutes to play back at 30 images per second. A one second flash recorded at 50,000 images per second will nearly 28 minutes to play back. We have recorded lightning at up to 100,000 images per second which takes 55 minutes to play back a 1 second recording.
From 2008-2011 I had the privilege of working with renown scientists Dr. Vlad Mazur and Dr. Lothar Ruhnke on upward lightning. In 2008, during a conference in Tucson, Arizona where Dr. Phil Krider featured my high-speed video captures, I met Dr. Marcelo Saba from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE). I consider him and Dr. Vlad Mazur as the pioneers of high-speed video analysis of lightning. Marcelo and I became close friends and colleagues, and to this day he continues to be my mentor on lightning research. Today we are members of the International Lightning Physics Group which seeks to better understand the physics of lightning.
In 2012, I, along with co-authors Dr. Ken Cummins and Dr. Richard Orville, published my first journal paper relating to upward lightning where I compared all the observations I had made to date with National Lightning Detection Network data.
From 2012-2014, I was the co-principal investigator for the National Science Foundation funded Upward Lightning Triggering Study (UPLIGHTS) which took place in Rapid City, South Dakota while I was affiliated with the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. Dr. John Helsdon was my advisor and the other co-principal investigator.
During the summers of 2011-2014, Marcelo had Brazilian students travel to Rapid City, South Dakota to help collect data on upward lightning. They brought electric field sensing equipment and in turn learned to operate my high-speed cameras. These colleagues, along with master’s students from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, collected data for the Upward Lightning Triggering Study. Many of these students went on to complete their master’s degrees and PhD degrees using data collected from this campaign as well as additional upward lightning data collected from Brazil. We also published a number of collaborative peer-reviewed journal papers which can be seen at my Publications page.
As of today, most of my high-speed cameras are now operating at The Johannesburg Lightning Research Laboratory at The University of the Witwatersrand under the supervision of Dr. Carina Schumann and Dr. Hugh Hunt who were colleagues during UPLIGHTS. Under Dr. Marcelo Saba’s vision and guidance, an international group of scientists now collaboratively collect lightning data around the world and work to better understand the physics of lightning, and as mentioned earlier, I am privileged to be a member. It has been a rewarding 20 years to say the least, and I am grateful to the many people I had the pleasure of meeting and working with along the way. I have learned so much, but there is so much more to try to understand. I continue to be intensely fascinated by lightning as well as other atmospheric “wildlife” that roam the skies and beyond.
Below are some selected videos recorded over the last 20 years.