On 4/12/12 12:50 PM, li...@lazygranch.com wrote:
I'd suggest getting Dr. Uman's "All About Lightning" as a starter. You could
read it in an afternoon, so to be correct, the book is all about lightning, but it
doesn't contain all the world's knowledge. ;-). It isn't very technical, though he has
written technical books as well.
An excellent book, as is the Dover book "Lightning".
Regarding schemes to prevent lightning hits, they are all controversial. That
is, scientists argue over the effectiveness. The one I see often in the high
desert looks like a brush made out of metal fibers.
Controversial is an understatement.
When there was an IEEE journal paper (well reviewed) essentially saying
that they don't work, one of the manufacturers of such devices sued the
author and the IEEE (unsuccessfully).
The same manufacturer proudly proclaims "as used by NASA and the US Air
Force" when what really happened is that both bought them as test
articles, for tests which failed. There's a great picture of a
lightning bolt coming down from the sky, skipping the top of the tower
and hitting the "lightning eliminator" square in the middle of the panel.
I've got to see ground hits in the desert twice. Amazing. The spot hit glows
yellow, which I presume is sodium ionization.
Or, "yellow heat" as in blackbody radiation.. it gets hot enough to fuse
sand into glass (fulgurites) and it takes a while to cool off. Some
years back, I was trying to make artificial fulgurites in my back yard
with large high voltage capacitor banks (hey, quarter shrinking gets
boring after a while).
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