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Monmouth College partnering with high schools to examine lightning

Monmouth College physics professor Chris Fasano doesn’t want to capture lightning, he just wants to study it.

With help from a grant from the National Science Foundation received in 2012, partnering high schools in the area have been acquiring data from lightning detectors at their schools.

Fasano tells WGIL that by gathering this atmospheric data 24/7 it gives students and scientists insights into how lightning forms and evolves.

“We see rapid increases during storms and what energy is in those photons and so on and all those,” Fasano says. “All that data eventually goes online so people can see it and use it, other scientists and anybody who wants to.”

Fasano led a caravan to last fall’s Prairie Section meeting of the American Physical Society, which included students from Monmouth College, 18 high school students and 5 teachers.

He tells WGIL that a highlight of the project has been working the high schools teachers, who he refers to as “rock stars.”

“They’re just fantastic I mean they’re working with these local students and working with us to accomplish a genuine research project. And we have lots of data that we really honestly are just getting started analyzing.”

Currently there are eight detectors and as Fasano writes a renewal of the NSF grant, his hope is for an additional ten.

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