Using cosmic rays to reveal Earth’s thunderstorm processes

Watts Up With That?

This shows a particle shower initiated by a cosmic ray reaches LOFAR through a thundercloud.
Credit: Radboud University

From the University of Groningen:

Exploding stars help to understand thunderclouds on Earth

How is lightning initiated in thunderclouds? This is difficult to answer – how do you measure electric fields inside large, dangerously charged clouds? It was discovered, more or less by coincidence, that cosmic rays provide suitable probes to measure electric fields within thunderclouds. This surprising finding is published in Physical Review Letters on April 24th. The measurements were performed with the LOFAR radio telescope located in the Netherlands.

‘We used to throw away LOFAR measurements taken during thunderstorms. They were too messy.’ says astronomer Pim Schellart. ‘Well, we didn’t actually throw them away of course, we just didn’t analyze them.’ Schellart, who completed his PhD in March this year at Radboud University in Nijmegen and is supervised by Prof…

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