The new IMAX film Stormchasers features NCAR's Schweizer SGS2-32 sailplane heading into a developing thunderstorm cloud. High in the clouds above Colorado, the NCAR sailplane, piloted by Bruce Miller, searches for answers to the riddle of what triggers lightning. This photo is from the IMAX film Stormchasers , which is showing at science centers and museums nationwide.
Viewers follow scientists into the world's worst weather to learn what makes storms tick.
Teachers can request an activity guide with instructions for experiments which demonstrate concepts related to storm phenomena. Photo courtesy of MacGillivray Freeman Films and the National Science Foundation Because a sailplane can ride atop ascending parcels of unstable air called thermals, it is ideally suited for studying how those air masses feed into thunderstorms and how the storms' electric fields are generated. The unique sampling ability of the sailplane provides continuous coverage of the cloud region where development of precipitation and electrification occurs. Many scientists believe that the way positive and negative electrical charges develop on particles within a cloud is essential to a thunderstorm's evolution. On the scale of a single thunderstorm, lightning is a discharge, or a means of releasing the tremendous electrical energy built up by the storm.