Sturm und Drang.

This article discusses studies on how lightning works and the attempts to find x-rays in lightning at the Institute for Experimental Physics of the Free University of Berlin. Currently, researchers must either literally wait around for lightning to strike, or else they can try to trigger it with rockets that work by trailing copper wires from the sky, thus" earthing" the clouds they are fired into. Although radar can track the way winds flow within a storm, it cannot easily discern the total energy of a storm, and whether that energy is increasing or decreasing.Earlier this year, Renyi Zhang of Texas A & M University and his colleagues published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences arguing that lightning is the most important source of ozone in the upper atmosphere. When the field is strong enough to overcome the attraction between electrons and their nuclei, there is a sudden electrical discharge. The problem is that, despite years of effort, researchers have never observed an electric field in a thunderstorm that is powerful enough to do this. On top of this, spark theory suggests that lightning should generate X-rays. Unfortunately, no one can find them.