The  areas of research  that we are interested in are listed below, with a brief description of each and some external links.

     1) Electric fields and the distribution of electric charge in storms -

    We study convective regions, stratiform cloud regions, and everywhere in between.  Recently, much of our attention has been on  mesoscale convective systems, which are thunderstorm complexes that are hundreds of kilometers across and last for several hours.  To study these systems we participated in a project called MEaPRS, an acronym for MCS Electricity and Polarization Radar Studies.  Based in Norman, Oklahoma, and with the support of the National Severe Storms Laboratory, we took part in the field phase of this project in May and June, 1998.  Our goal for the observations was to acquire electric field soundings in all the different regions --convective updraft, convective downdraft, transition zone, and stratiform cloud-- of an MCS.  Analyses of these data are in progress, and preliminary results were presented at the 11th International Conference on Atmospheric Electricity (June 1999) and at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (December 1999).  Two manuscripts have been submitted (April and July, 2000) to the Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres, also.
    We have also taken part in studies that concentrated on  supercell storms, which are the kind that most tornadoes come from.  Our goal in these recent experiments was to get soundings of electric field through the updraft region, where the upward air velocity can exceed 100 miles per hour.
    From a mountaintop in New Mexico, at the Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research, we have studied small air mass storms.  In a field project during the summer of 1999 we investigated the electrical evolution of six thunderstorms by launching as many as seven instrumented balloons into each storm.  Analysis of these data is currently our main task.  Initial results of this study were presented at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (December 1999).
 

For this type of study, a  particle-charge instrument is attached to the balloons in addition to the usual instruments.  This instrument measures the amount of electric charge carried by individual precipitation-sized particles as these particles pass through it.  One result from these studies is a indication of how much of the total charge in a cloud is carried by precipitation-sized particles and how much is carried by the much smaller but more prevalent cloud particles.  This fundamental information is helpful in understanding how the charge in a storm is generated.
 

We have a very basic interest in understanding how the electric fields that we measure inside storms result in and are affected by lightning flashes.  Our database of nearly 200 electric field soundings through thunderstorms have helped identify a possible lightning initiation process.  Our data are also proving useful to those scientists trying to understand sprites and other high altitude luminous events.

We have studied this part of the  sunrise effect  phenomenon with a tethered balloon system at NASA Kennedy Space Center/Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.  The electric fields at the surface there are sometimes an order of magnitude larger than expected during fair weather.  Results from this study were presented at the 11th International Conference on Atmospheric Electricity in June, 1999.  In the future we would like to conduct further studies of the fair weather electrical environment.