Lightning Hunters Like a bolt from above

Ten thousand feet high in the New Mexico mountains, Jake Trueblood is getting ready to fire rockets into a thunderstorm.

He lines up eight rockets, straight as soldiers, then connects each to a wire bobbin once used to guide missiles for the French military. Trueblood arms the rockets and heads underground, then waits for hours in a windowless chamber on whose metal roof the rockets sit.

Trueblood, a graduate student at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, is waiting for a good strong electric field in the atmosphere. Then he'll push a button that will send a whoosh of compressed air to a single rocket, sending it careening more than a thousand feet high. The goal is for the rapidly moving wire to trick the air into discharging its electricity in a lightning flash that will slam to the ground just above Trueblood's head.

He and other lightning hunters aren't out on the mountaintop this August day for the thrill. They're here, at New Mexico Tech's Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research, in search of knowledge. “We're here because we're trying to understand the simplest storms we know of and we can't,” says Graydon Aulich, a lightning researcher at the lab.