As you may remember from a post on advancements in lightning modelling, i’m a bit of a lightning fanboy, and i’m even more of a laser fanboy, so this news makes me cream my pants. The basic idea behind lightning is that electric charge forms in a cloud and results such a strong electric field that it ionizes a channel of air between the cloud and ground, forming an excellent conductor (ionized air is a great conductor). This results in the lightning strikes you see, a massive amount of current flowing from the cloud down to earth through this ionized channel of air.

What the European researchers have done is use a pulsed laser to artificially ionize air to trigger lightning (see official report here). Now they have NOT been able to create a full cloud to ground lightning, what they have been able to achieve is to see that the in-cloud lightning activity was increased in places where they aimed the laser. They are however working on getting a full cloud-to-ground lightning going, by increasing the power and efficiency of their pulsed laser in hopes of being able to maintain the ionized channel well enough to obtain full lightning.

Now this would not be a completely groundbreaking thing to do. Scientists have been inducing lightning for years now using a more crude method that has about 50% success rate. They “simply” shoot up a rocket into the cloud that has a conducting wire connected to it (so now the lightning travels through the wire insted of an ionized channel of air). In fact the accompanying picture with this article is of just that (you can look here to read more about it). But if they succeed at doing this it would cut costs, time and effort required to obtain this and could potentially have some new applications as well. Any way you cut it, laser induced lightning is just cool as hell.