El Defensor Chieftain reporter Cathy Cook recently visited NMT's Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research. She spoke at length wth Director Harald Edens about the history of the lab and the changing face of research.

Here is an excerpt of her article with a link to the Chieftain site at the bottom of this page.

 

Studying lightning in the Magdalenas

 

The question for Harald Edens is how do you make a spark out of nothing?

(At right is Dr. Harald Edens, Director of Langmuir Lab.)

Edens is the Director of Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research, a New Mexico Tech Laboratory situated at the top of the Magdalena Mountain Range within the Cibola National Forest. The laboratory is well situated to study lightning, thunderstorms and precipitation.

The lab was built in the 1960s and named for Nobel Prize winner Irving Langmuir, who studied cloud seeding in the 1950s. An ancient goat herding pen is visible during the winding drive to the lab, hikers climb on trails in the national forest below and within the mountain is a Faraday cage, where researchers can safely study lightning.

In summer monsoon months, researchers study lightning by triggering lightning strikes. In the winter months they evaluate the data they’ve collected and create new instruments to collect more data.

(At right, lightning strikes the Plains of San Agustin. Photo by Harald Edens.)

Despite lightning being a common phenomenon, there is still a lot to learn about it, like exactly how thunderstorms get their charge and how lightning initiates.

Somehow, neutral molecules become free ions and free electrons briefly, which get accelerated into fields. The question is how.  Many people think that cosmic rays going through the atmosphere may ionize molecules in the clouds to start the chain reaction that leads to lightning, said Edens, while others do not believe that a cosmic ray is needed and something else starts the process ...

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