Heavy rains and lightning storms are common in Gainesville during summer.

That’s convenient for U. Florida lightning researchers, who recently received a $9.8-million federal grant to hire graduate and undergraduate students, as well as purchase new equipment.

“It’s pretty exciting,” said Vladimir Rakov, professor of electrical and computer engineering at UF. “Funding for lightning research is usually pretty low.”

Most grants for lightning research are given following lightning-related disasters like the lightning strike of Apollo 12 in the 1960s, he said. However, no such disasters have occurred recently, he said.

The grant went into effect June 1, and seven UF graduate and undergraduate students have already been hired. The grant’s purpose is to study how lightning makes its way from the cloud to the ground, and how it selects where it will strike, he said. Researchers need the assistance of several high-speed cameras to capture pictures of strikes. They already have three such cameras and will look to purchase two or three more, he said.

The new cameras will be able to film at 3 million frames per second and will be used at the research facility at Camp Blanding, where researchers have the capability to artificially trigger lightning.

To trigger the lightning, researchers connect a wire to a rocket and launch it at a thundercloud. When a cloud is ready to discharge a bolt of lightning, they fire the rocket toward the cloud. The rocket creates a stronger electrical field near the cloud, which triggers a lightning strike to where the wire is grounded.