I
you
old sayings aside lightning sometimes
does strike twice but perhaps not always
in the same place can one lightning bolt
somehow trigger a second so called
sympathetic strike many miles away
what's closely this is lightning as seen
from the Space Shuttle seem to be
sympathetic flashes want to go off and a
couple next to it Roger that these
flashes are very interesting because
they show a possible relationship
between very large flashes separated by
large distances hopefully the shuttle
data will help us to understand this
phenomenon and that's just one of the
objectives of lightning research being
conducted by scientists here at NASA's
Marshall Space Flight Center in
Huntsville Alabama and some new answers
will likely come from an ongoing series
of space shuttle based lightning
experiments the shuttles television
cameras will be used to simulate what
future lightning sensors will see a
global weather computer called Makeda's
will alert the crew to what storms lie
ahead so that additional pictures can be
taken ultimately NASA hopes to use this
information to design lightning sensing
instruments to be placed on future
satellites and on the space station
freedom if we put lightning sensors into
geostationary orbit into low-earth orbit
will be able to get a global mapping of
lightning activity improving our
understanding of the basic physics of
storms and developing new ways to
observe them will lead to better
forecasting abilities making us all
safer from this deadly force of nature
perhaps we're just beginning to
understand what this research may lead
to as an example we've uncovered some
relationships between lightning activity
the flash rate of lighting and the
precipitation rain volume of the cloud
if we can establish this relationship
and quantifying further we would be able
to then use whitening from lightning
observations from space to turn on with
the rainfall rate from a particular
storm system is using the vantage point
of space to better understand the many
environmental systems in our world and
how they interact is the goal of NASA's
initiative for the 1990s known as
mission to Planet Earth for now ongoing
lightning studies
provide researchers with an important
head start in Huntsville this is Mike
Harrington reporting
I guess I want to say it's really a
fresh
farrell circular circulatory patterns
that are not quite organized into one
year failure decide to join up it i'll
be a good doctor that support a
panhandle and alabama some places are
getting a little bit worried about it i
always around in here for two or
three before they get to the northeast
could have a problem