The Lightning planets

[n2doc]

Earth, Jupiter, Saturn and now Venus

By Larry O'Hanlon | Mon Nov 23, 2009 01:27 PM ET

The Scoop: No matter what planet you're on, lightning is about storms, and about ice and rain -- even if it's not necessarily water rain. I spoke with Timothy Dowling of the University of Louisville about some of the strange places lightning is made on other planets, and why lightning matters at all, in a planetary sense...


larryohanlon: Hello!

tedow: I think we are good to go.

larryohanlon: Well thanks again for your willingness to do this, and putting up with my chaotic morning. So I was referred to you because you study lightning on other planets. Is that right?

tedow: I'm a planetary scientist, and my specialty is planetary atmospheres. Lightning is a very specific subject. I develop an atmospheric model, the EPIC model, that simulates the gas giants (and the other planets). We added clouds to the model a couple of years ago (but not lightning!)

larryohanlon: But there is lightning on other planets, right?

tedow: Yes! Jupiter has amazing lightning. We can see it on the dark side. Both Voyager and Galileo saw large lightning flashes on Jupiter, and we've correlated it with convective storm activity in low-pressure regions.

larryohanlon: The dark side -- which we can only see with spacecraft, right, since we generally only see Jupiter's sunny side here in the inner solar system?

tedow: That's right. Even the Hubble Space Telescope only gets a sunny view of the gas giants. Spacecraft also can detect lightning indirectly, by the telltale signatures of radio and magnetic pulses it generates.

more:

http://news.discovery.com/earth/jupiter-saturn-venus-lightning.html

[juno jones]

1. K&R!

Fascinating, thanks!