Not All in a Flash

After 40 years of near solitude, New Mexico Tech’s Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research may have to adjust a bit when the Magdalena Ridge Observatory sets up nearby (see accompanying story). In particular, says Langmuir Director Bill Winn, balloons and rockets from thunderstorm research could land on the MRO telescopes, and radio noise from the MRO could interfere with Langmuir measurements. “We can live together—we just have to sort things out,” Winn says.

The Langmuir lab is rare in that thunderstorms play out in their entirety right there, so researchers don’t have to chase storms, the more common approach. Research at Langmuir spans ground- and balloon-based measurements of lightning and thunderstorms, applications such as lightning rod safety, and instrument development. The lab’s flashy new tool is the Lightning Mapping Array, a set of ground-based radio antennas that use the global positioning system to determine the time-of-arrival of radio frequency signals, from which the path and time development of lightning can be worked out. “Our main interest is to learn more about lightning—how thunderstorms become charged, where the charge is located, how lightning propagates,” says the lab’s Bill Rison, one of the instrument’s developers. “The eternal question is, Why do thunderstorms produce lightning? How do they develop a charge strong enough?”