The chances of lightning striking the same place twice are probably slim, but new research provides another aspect of the puzzle. Can distant lightnings talk to each other?
Avi Blizovsky
Lightnings occurring simultaneously, photographed from the space shuttle Columbia on its 87th orbit. Photo courtesy of Dr. Yoav Yair
The chances of lightning striking the same place twice are probably slim, but new research provides another aspect of the puzzle. Can distant lightnings talk to each other? Evidence for this gathered from data taken from the space shuttle Columbia on the last mission shows that it is possible that this is not a random phenomenon and that lightning flashes seem coordinated, even if they are far apart.
Dr. Yair said in a special conversation to the Hedaan website during the annual conference of the Israeli Astronomical Society held on Friday (30/12) in Raz, that coordinated behavior of lightning has been observed in the past, but only at short distances. However, during the last thirty years, astronauts have watched from space In the behavior of lightning that seems to be coordinated with each other hundreds of kilometers away, a phenomenon that astronaut Edward Gibson (in the fourth team of the Skylab Space Laboratory, 1973) called "sympathetic lightning bolts". "Lightning occurred simultaneously or almost simultaneously over large areas and large distances. Dozens of lightning flashes occurred almost simultaneously after a period of silence, then the activity subsided for a few seconds only to resume again everywhere. Astronaut Richard Trulli (the second and eighth shuttle flights, in 1981) reported two separate areas in the Amazon basin where the lightning "talked to each other". Also astronaut Rick Husband, who flew in 1996 on flight STS-75 and was the commander of Columbia on flight STS- 107 that ended in disaster: "I saw lightning dancing everywhere. It was beautiful." (Things said by Hasband from Colombia to Yoav Yair in a briefing before the Columbia flight).
The news section of the journal Science notes from the planetary scientist, Dr. Yoav Yair of the Open University in Israel that he hopes to confirm these statements. To look for patterns in the sequence of lightning strikes, Yair and his colleagues (led by the student Roi Yaniv from the Open University, AB) used a mathematical field called network theory - an approach that is often used to analyze relationships between people - for example actors who participated in the same film. Lightning can be included in groups of those that occur close in time between them.
When the scientists from Israel analyzed the video clips taken from the space shuttle Columbia before it disintegrated on its way back to Earth, they found that lightning did not strike randomly during large lightning storms. Instead, they found several lightning centers - hot spots similar to popular actors appearing together in several movies. The flashes from those hot spots were followed by flashes in other hot spots. Network theory predicts that there may be a connection between distant lightning strikes.
Although the study does not prove that one lightning strike can trigger another lightning strike hundreds of kilometers away, it suggests the possibility that there is a hidden connection." says Yair, who reported on the findings in early December at a conference of the American Geophysical Union. It is possible that the language of lightning consists of "whistles," he said, meaning that lightning strikes cause electrons in the upper atmosphere to drop down at a distant point.
Lightning physicist William Boeck of Niagara University in New York State says that long-term twinning is possible, but he prefers another mechanism - electromagnetic waves released by the lightning may blast to the ground and trigger lightning elsewhere.
In a conversation with the Hidan website, Dr. Yair says: "This is a second pass over the photographs taken by the instruments of the Madex experiment on the space shuttle Columbia. In the first pass we looked for the phenomena in the upper atmosphere (elves, elves, etc.). This time we looked at the lightnings themselves, not the elves and found that in certain storms it seems as if lightnings are talking to each other - at a distance of 500, 800 and even a thousand kilometers, lightnings happen at the same time or with differences of milliseconds from each other in a kind of cycle that implies some kind of synchronicity. We checked if this is a random phenomenon or if it is a phenomenon that is at least semi-cyclical. We examined the emergence of mathematical tools of network theory. We assumed that lightning in an array of clouds behaves like a network. Network theory has all kinds of classifications of networks. There are random networks, there are networks that have clear rules about who responds to whom, and there is the whole range in between. We conducted mathematical tests and discovered that the phenomenon is not random. It has a legality that we still do not know how to explain its physical mechanism, and we have some hypotheses. The astronauts saw it with their eyes already from the first laps, but no one attributed any significance to it, but we showed that it is a significant phenomenon and we are looking for the physical explanation of how lightning in one place can cause another lightning 500 to a thousand kilometers away."
How was it done?
Dr. Yair: A student named Roi Yaniv from the Open University went frame by frame on the films of the Madex experiment. We analyzed seven storms and then ran the data through models of network theory, Dr. Reuven Aviv and Dr. Gilad Ravid who built the network model showed that lightning storms far apart from each other behave like a non-random network but a network with a certain regularity that implies a connection and we proposed two mechanisms. Following the presentation of the research at the Geophysical Union conference, NASA is giving me all the films they have taken since the XNUMXs for reanalysis, free of charge. Even earlier, following the results of the Madex experiment itself, we got a good reputation as atmospheric experts. About a year ago, a researcher from Berkeley gave us photos from previous flights of a camera mounted on the back of the shuttle to find elves on the Earth's horizon. Unfortunately, we discovered that the camera suffered from optical problems, so it was impossible to locate the phenomenon. Following the Madex experiment, at least NASA treats us - an appreciation for our professionalism in analyzing space data.
In his lecture to the Astronomical Society, Dr. Yair told about a series of satellites that continue to collect data on the elf phenomenon that has since been studied as part of the Israeli Medex experiment, aboard the Columbia, and have become a target for research. One Taiwanese satellite has already been transmitting data for several months and more satellites will join in the near future.
