Hare Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2021

Lightning corona Imaging From a radio Telescope

We do not understand how lightning in our atmosphere initiates, nor how it develops and propagates after initiation. The fundamental difficulty is that these basic lightning phenomena are driven by the meter-scale dynamics of the low-conductivity plasma that surrounds the lightning channel, known as the corona, but the dynamics of this corona is as-yet unresolved. Resolving the structure of the lightning corona and how it develops in time is the holy grail of lightning science, as it will reveal the mechanism behind lightning initiation, the physics behind how lightning channels grow and propagate, and why lightning emits intense flashes of X-ray and gamma ray radiation. During the LIFT…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.