[SunkenCiv]

Gamma rays from thunderstorms?
May 03, 2005
http://www.physorg.com/news3959.html

"Duke University engineers have led the most detailed analyses of links between some lightning events and mysterious gamma ray emissions that emanate from earth's own atmosphere. Their study suggests that this gamma radiation fountains upward from starting points surprisingly low in thunderclouds. Counter-intuitively, these strong gamma outbursts also seem to precede associated lightning discharges by a split second."

[Nowhere Man]

"Duke University engineers have led the most detailed analyses of links between some lightning events and mysterious gamma ray emissions that emanate from earth's own atmosphere. Their study suggests that this gamma radiation fountains upward from starting points surprisingly low in thunderclouds. Counter-intuitively, these strong gamma outbursts also seem to precede associated lightning discharges by a split second."

Interesting article. Also I find "sferics" fascinating, basically, it is listening to radio waves in the longwave band (below 520 kc on the AM dial) and below where you hear distant lightning stokes and so on. When you get to the really low frequencies like around 15 kc or so, you can hear lots of weird things like whistles, pops and others from charged particles acting with the Earth's magnetic field, the auroras and so on. Back in the 1980's, I heard one of my fellow ham radio operators constructed a "growler" (sometimes you can hear growls too) by wrapping a wire several times around his room and hooked it into the input of an audio amplfier and heard the whistles, pops, and the growling noises from the "sferics." Sounds like I can put my all vacuum tube (1964) Sherwood amp to use. Back in the late 1940's, there was a radio made with a meter that would show how far lighnting strikes were away from the location and in an old 1963/64 QST Magazine (amateur radio), there are plans for using an oscilliscope to receive, plot and determine distances of lightning strikes.