A Laboratory in the Sky
The Tashkent TV Tower, at 375 meters (1,230 feet), is the tallest structure in Central Asia. Completed on January 15, 1985, its primary function is television and radio broadcasting, with signals reaching across the Tashkent region and into southern Kazakhstan. The tower also houses a complex hydrometeorological station. Its steel lattice structure, supported by three massive legs, was engineered to withstand a magnitude 9 earthquake. This robust design makes it an ideal platform for a unique field of atmospheric physics: the study of upward lightning.
Unlike typical cloud-to-ground lightning, upward lightning initiates from a tall, grounded object and propagates toward the storm cloud above. The extreme height of the Tashkent Tower increases the local electric field at its tip, creating the necessary conditions to launch these upward flashes. This phenomenon allows scientists to observe the development of the initial lightning channel, known as a leader, from a fixed, instrumented point. Studying leader propagation is difficult with natural lightning, which strikes unpredictably. Research at similar tall structures uses high-speed cameras (recording up to 100,000 frames per second), electric field meters, and lightning mapping arrays to analyze this process in detail.