Imaging Lightning and Related Phenomena

Lightning is something that almost everyone is familiar with at some level, and as such it seems like it should be well understood. In fact, many aspects of lightning are not well understood, and many details of how it works and the spectacular effects it can produce (such as launching beams of antimatter into space) have only been discovered in the past 10 to 20 years. Imaging in many different forms remains one of the primary tools in this research field, and I will show some recent imaging-related results that emerged from our recently completed DARPA-funded program.

Dr. Steven Cummer is currently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He received B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1991, 1993, and 1997. He spent two years at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as a National Research Council postdoctoral research associate before joining Duke in 1999. He was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Otago in New Zealand in 2009. He has written or coauthored more than 170 papers in refereed journals, is a Fellow of the IEEE, and received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2001. His current research interests span a variety of wave propagation problems in engineered composite materials for electromagnetics and acoustics, and in geophysical remote sensing with a focus on lightning and atmospheric electricity.