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“This storm has been going on, off and on all afternoon in different pockets, but it makes us want to fly.”

Welcome to Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries, a glimpse into the world of science from the inside. Richard Sonnenfeld is an atmospheric physicist at New Mexico Tech. He’s at Langmuir Laboratory, situated high in New Mexico’s Magdalena Mountains, the perfect location to study lightning. Sonnenfeld and his team launch weather balloons which are outfitted with small computers. The balloons fly high into storms and track electrical activity.

“I'm sitting in a radome. Which is about a twelve foot in diameter hemispherical structure, a lot like the geodesic domes that people used to build. It's made all of fiberglass, and it's intended to keep the elements out, but let radio waves through. So, it's a wonderful thing to do telemetry to receive data from our balloon packages that we fly into storms.”

Telemetry refers to the remote communication of data and location through radio waves.

“The most important information we get from our instrument is actually its position in the sky, because it flies its own global positioning system unit. And, if we do get a position, we usually know within fifty meters where it lands. So, we can go pick it up and know where it is. So we just rely on finding the instrument and then all of the scientific data is stored on a compact flash, just like for a camera.”

The instruments used by Richard Sonnenfeld and his students register the way that a lightning flash redistributes the electrical charges in a thundercloud. Scientists still know little about what triggers a lightning flash. For more information, check out pulseplanet.com. Pulse of the Planet's Science Diaries are made possible by the National Science Foundation.