Scientists have discovered with the help of the LOFAR radio telescope that lightning and thunderstorms in the Netherlands deviate from other places in the world. The electrically charged parts have been turned over, creating the lightning as it were.
“It is something weird that we cannot explain,” says Brian Hare van Astron, who is involved in the research on behalf of the company and on behalf of the back. Hare is following everything that has to do with electricity, but when he first saw a different flash in his data a few years ago, he did not know what was happening. “To be honest, frustration first followed. I thought, oh no, lightning is doing something crazy again. This is a normal thought with lightning researchers, because we know so little about lightning. Every time we do a new measurement, something totally new happens.”
Her later decided to go further into the mystery together with the rest of his research group. It turned out: it was not an incident, but in the Netherlands to be entire thunderstorms upside down compared to, for example, the United States.
According to Hare, research into lightning has always been done in other countries such as in the US, Japan or Spain. The reason: Lightning is much more common, so then you have more chance of usable measurement results. “As a lightning researcher, you mainly want to be in the places where the coolest and most spectacular flashes occur and, sorry, that is not the Netherlands. The Netherlands is not known for hugely electrically charged lightning.”