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ABSTRACT
Lightning has been studied for centuries with surprisingly meager progress since the early
breakthroughs of Franklin. There are numerous reasons for this lack of
progress: lightning is complex, it is very energetic with large peak
power - hard for in-situ probes to survive, it is spatially and temporally
sparse – hard to place a sensor in an optimal location. However,
modern technological advances and innovations have led to new remote
sensing capabilities that are starting to peel back layers of understanding,
while at the same time, revealing new mysteries. With improved understanding
of how clouds electrify and the realization that lightning dissipates
most of the electrical energy, remote detection of lightning has become
an increasingly important means for monitoring storm development and
severity. This will be especially true when the Geostationary Lightning
Mapper is launched on GOES-R. This presentation will address our present
understanding on how clouds generate electrical energy and how lightning
in turn dissipates this energy. It will also discuss a few of the remaining
mysteries in lightning physics and some of the new techniques being employed
to address them. |
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