Tom Warner, lightning researcher, talked through the old vs new way of understanding lightning, multiple attachments to spinning wind turbines turbines, upward vs downward lightning, how tall objects actually cause more lightning strikes, and more. Follow up with Tom on his website or watch slow-motion videos on his YouTube channel.



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Transcript - Tom Warner, Lightning Researcher



00:00:01:00 - 00:00:09:19UnknownI picture you and like your copilot, like in that scene in Caddyshack, just you're getting pelted by three inch hail, you're like, Well, I don't think the heavy stuff is going to come down for quite some time now.



00:00:09:23 - 00:00:28:11UnknownYeah, it was. It was pretty. It was pretty loud. In fact, they put a microphone right on the on the front of the canopy. We recorded two channels of audio, the pilot's comments and then this other hail Mike, and that scientists could actually kind of gauge the size of the hail just from the loud loudness from that



00:00:28:11 - 00:01:01:06Unknownmicrophone. Welcome back. I'm Dan Blewett. I'm Allen Hall and I'm Rosemary Barnes. And this is the Up Time podcast bringing you the latest in wind energy, tech news and policy. All right. Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.



00:01:01:15 - 00:01:20:08UnknownI'm your co-host Dan Blewett. On today's episode. We've got a great guest here today, a lightning expert. Tom Warner. So Tom has a really interesting background, which we'll get into. He was also a pilot in the Air Force and flew this legendary aircraft that will get into a little bit called the T28 storm penetrating aircraft.



00:01:20:13 - 00:01:37:18UnknownAnd what this really means is that it was someone taking aircraft up into storms with the intention of seeing how they did getting struck by lightning, getting hit by a six inch hail. All this crazy stuff in the name of learning more about storms and lightning and how they all interact with planes.



00:01:38:02 - 00:01:51:04UnknownAnd also, he's done a lot of research and photography, high speed video on wind turbine. So a lot of stuff that you'll see in high speed video. You can see how lightning propagates the leaders. Lots of stuff that has never been seen before.



00:01:51:12 - 00:02:10:00UnknownSo, Allan, give me a little more context into Tom because to say like, you're a lightning expert, but Tom is like the lightning expert for lightning experts. Yeah, he's a resource for a lot of people because he's published so much and he's been involved in lightning reaching up from towers, and it's a whole series of papers and



00:02:10:00 - 00:02:28:19Unknownresearch. If you go to his website, you can download some of them or find out where you can get them that it was research oriented on wind turbines and also tall towers that were propagating leaders up into the sky and creating these thunderstorm lightning events.



00:02:29:04 - 00:02:50:04UnknownAnd also, I think it's one of the early places that I saw where a lightning strike far down field can trigger reactions in the cloud and create the situation where these were tall towers. White light wind turbines can start reaching out to the sky simultaneously, and we've seen a lot more images like that in the last couple



00:02:50:04 - 00:03:11:14Unknownof years. Some of them from Tom, some from other researchers in the U.S. and Spain and around the world. But that knowledge of where things are happening in the cloud and it has an impact on the way lightning approaches, wind turbines and tall towers,