How Hot Could Lighting Be?

 A lighting strike is an electric discharge between the atmosphere and an earth bound object. Lighting is one of the major destructive forces of nature, it is quite surprising that known very little about this powerful phenomenon.

A lighting researcher named Robert Moore from the University of Florida said “the basic physics of lighting such as lighting initiation and lighting propagation is not fully understood at this point”. It is said that lighting cause more than 5 billion dollars damages every year in the United States.

Xiangchao Li, a lighting specialist from china said that a direct hit from lighting can melt a power cable or start a forest fire. He and his team discovered a mathematical relationship between the current intensity and the temperature inside lighting.

There are approximately more than 100,000 lighting strikes every day, a device known as an impulse current generator system; this generates artificial lighting with currents up to more than 10,000 amperes while a current with few amperes can easily kill an adult male.

A natural lighting strike carries between 20-30,000 amperes of current, with the use of the impulse current, Li and his team was able to dial up currents between 5,000 and 50,000. It resulted that the artificial lighting strikes had temperature as high as 17,000 degrees Fahrenheit, two times the heat of the surface of the sun after lots of tests; they concluded that the temperature difference between lighting strikes with 1,000 and 10,000 amperes is similar to those with 10,000 and 100,000 amperes

"The next step would be to compare with measurements from rocket triggered lightning, or natural lightning, which can be done throughout the U.S. or China," Moore suggested..

That's right, rocket-triggered lightning. Essentially a glorified version of Benjamin Franklin's wired kite, scientists today have ways to siphon natural lightning from the sky by launching an electrically grounded rocket

This research has helped engineers to improve current protocols and infrastructures to better deal with lighting the creation of weather warning systems and power grids are also formed from the research made by Xiangchao Li and his team.