Lightning researchers receive $9.8 million defense agency grant

June 28, 2010

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Just in time for Florida’s summer lightning season, a $9.8 million grant will greatly expand research operations at the University of Florida and Florida Institute of Technology International Center for Lightning Research and Testing.

The four-year grant from the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, will let researchers probe the basic science of lightning using the center’s unique rocket-triggered lightning capabilities, said Martin Uman, co-director and a UF distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering.

The grant, which began this month, will allow the center to hire new engineers and postdoctoral associates and to take on new graduate students, as well as buy cutting-edge equipment — including a high-speed camera capable of photographing triggered lightning at the rate of 3 million frames each second, Uman said.

“It’s a big thing, and a major recognition that our lightning research program is likely the best in the world,” he said.

UF researchers at the lightning center, based at the Camp Blanding Army National Guard Base near Starke, fire wire-trailing rockets into storm clouds to trigger and study strikes. Investigations have spanned how to better protect electrical power lines, homes and airplanes to lightning’s root causes and characteristics. In recent years, a team of UF and Florida Institute of Technology researchers were the first to document X-rays produced by triggered lightning. And late last year, the team published research on the possible radiation threat posed by lightning-produced X-rays to airline passengers and crews flying near storms.

Uman said the DARPA grant is aimed at exploring how lightning starts in the cloud, how it moves through the air, and how it connects to the ground.

“The whole initiation process is basically unknown,” he said. “What we are going to do is get directly at that.”

DARPA is also giving grants to several other institutions to study five fundamental aspects of lightning, Uman said. Investigations include the effect of lightning on the ionosphere, and the role, if any, of cosmic rays on lightning initiation. UF’s $9.8 million comes on top of about $1.25 million already provided by DARPA over the past two and a half years to lay the foundations for the new research.