An example of a high altitude negative leader (HANL), part of a lightning flash observed with the LOFAR radio telescope in the Netherlands. HANLs, at altitudes higher than 7km, are much larger than leaders at lower altitudes. Pulses are colored by age, with bright white pulses fading to shades of blue and purple over time.

Technical

This HANL consists of 6k pulses in a text file. We wrote a custom reader for ParaView, then visualized the data as points and exported to glTF.

Project

Produced in collaboration with Brian Hare and Olaf Scholten at the University of Groningen. More details on HANLs can be found in their paper in Atmospheric Research.

What next?

More lightning & visualizations!

See more of Dr. Hare’s work!