Weather Imagery

How exactly lightning forms is still open for debate. The most commonly accepted theory is that electrons are stripped off cloud particles caught in a thunderstorm’s updraft. Once these particles lose an electron, their net remaining charge becomes positive. These positively charged particles will rise high into the upper most part of the thunderstorm where they tend to collect. Conversely, other particles in the cloud acquire an electron after the collision and as a result, their net remaining charge is negative. The negatively charged particles tend to collect at the base of the cloud.

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When we had our house built, DR Horton installed the crappiest windows possible. To make matters worse, the windows were installed poorly and rain water leaked down through the walls causing quite a headache. I waited 6 months for them to come out and replace the windows the first time. Well, the second time they leaked I decided to take matters into my own hands. No, I didn’t take them to court. The money I would of spent in court fighting them to replace the crappy windows with the same crappy window was instead used to buy brand new windows. Top quality windows.

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A couple years ago I installed a furnace humidifier because the air in Colorado is extremely dry, especially when the cold winter air is heated to 68°F. When you heat cold dry air, the humidity level drops considerably. Our first solution was to run three small warm mist and cool mist humidifiers throughout the house which meant changing a lot of filters and re-filling with water. Even still, we would average about 11% humidity which meant every light switch, doorknob and button we touched produced a 1.21 gigawatt lightning bolt. That’s when I decided enough was engouh and I needed something bigger. Either one of those big whole house humidifiers that looks like a small refrigerator and is a serious eye-sore or a furnace humidifier that is out of sight, out of mind. I chose the latter.

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The best way to answer this is to explain the concept behind a lightning rod, the unpredictability of a lightning strike and what happens when the lightning hits the lightning rod. Lightning rods do not attract lightning until it is very close to the rod, and the best way to explain this is probably through an example.

A simple lightning rod is nothing more than a conductive piece of metal about 3 feet in length that sits atop the highest point on a house. Attached to this piece of metal is a thick copper wire that runs down the side of the house and attaches to a pipe which is driven several feet into the earth. That’s it.

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The idea of harnessing lightning and using the electricity to supplement our power grid has been thought up many times in the past. But knowing when and where lightning will strike, capturing the lightning bolt, finding the right materials that could withstand the sudden surge of electricity and pushing it onto the electrical grid are not easy obstacles to overcome.

A typical lightning bolt produces about 10,000 amps but some bolts, such as the one that struck the Apollo spacecraft upon liftoff in the 60’s, have measured well over 100,000 amps. Nowadays, there are large capacitors and batteries which could store the huge amounts of electricity a lightning bolt creates, but would it be practical to try and harness it? Surprisingly, no. There is very little power in a lightning bolt when you compare it to how much power we really use in our homes and cities.

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A lot of weather folk lore over the years has made claim that insects can predict the weather and that by observing the insects, we humans can make better decisions on how to dress, what crops to plant or whether to water the lawn or not. I have yet to read or see any evidence the confirms insects somehow have a better ability to forecast the weather than the local meteorologist on TV. Fact is, insects don’t predict weather. They simply react to its immediate changes.

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