The Eagle Nest Tower - Natural Lightning Laboratory

The Gamma-Ray Imaging (GRI) project consolidated the Eagle Nest Tower. This tower in one of the five towers in the world able to measure lightning currents of direct flashes. In GRI, the tower is being upgraded with a new current transducer able to measure continuous components of lightning currents. Continuous currents seem to distinguish those lightnings that produce TLE. Nearby the Eagle Nest Tower is being installed an experimental interferometer to map in altitude the sources emited of lightning which strike the tower. This system is being installed under the framework of GRI and allows to do the first 3D measurements of a lightning channel for which its current is measured at the channel base (by means of the ENT). The ENT also host the intensified high speed camera for TLE that the group obtained by means of GRI.

Because the measurement of x-rays from lightning requires being very close to the lightning flash and in order to optimize the chances of recording high energy events from nearby lightning flashes, we upgraded the tower, in the frame of ASIM, with two x-ray detectors in conjunction with a dedicated high-speed video camera (2000 fps) and electromagnetic field antennas. The setup of instrumentation at the Eagle Nest tower is scheduled in April 2011. This will be the first setup in an instrumented tower for measuring natural lightning x-rays, electromagnetic fields and very close imaging.orem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.

The tower is prepared to work during all the year and it is remote controlled. Due to its situation (2537 m high), the maintenance in winter is complicated. All the equipment installed in the tower must support extended temperature range.