Will a bare wire encircling a tent and connected to a tall metal rod help to protect the tent from a direct lightning strike?

Question

I am planning to go camping later this month and I am concerned about lightning since the campsite I will be staying at is located on flat terrain in a rural area in Illinois. This campsite is located out in 'farm country' so there are not too many trees around. I have an idea of how to help protect my tent from being directly hit by a lightning bolt, but I before I put this idea into action, I first want to ask the Engineering.SE community if it is a fundamentally sound idea.

What I am thinking of doing is that I will first set up my tent and then I will use a hammer to pound an eight foot tall, 3/4" diameter copper rod about a foot into the ground at a spot about six feet away from the back of my tent. I will then lay down a bare wire (8 AWG copper/aluminum stranded wire) on the ground along the outside walls of my tent and then I will connect the two ends of this wire near the bottom of the copper rod. I plan to have this wire laying about a foot away from the walls of my tent and to have it pushed down into the soil to a depth of about 1/2 inch.

My thought is that during a thunderstorm, any increasing negative/positive electrical charge within the ground located directly under my tent should flow outwards and into the encircling copper/aluminum wire and into the copper rod. So, if a lightning bolt were to come down towards my tent, I believe it should follow a path into the copper rod and down into the ground below it, and I also believe that some of the lightning bolt should branch off and travel through the wire and down into the ground below the wire instead of directly hitting my tent.

Will a bare wire encircling a tent and connected to a tall metal rod help to protect the tent from a direct lightning strike?

Answer 1

Even though my direct experience through cable television technical seminars is more than two decades behind me, the science hasn't aged much, nor has the technology changed by any degree.

Keep in mind that a tree can be struck by lightning and the charge will travel in the ground as far as hundreds of feet. The tree roots will be much deeper than your copper rod, even though the resistance is likely to be lower for the copper.

Part of the developed technology involved the discovery of "bleeding" the charge from the approaching storm. This has manifested locally on the interstate weigh stations as pointy metal "christmas trees" with many leaves. That tree is mounted on the top of poles at least fifty feet in the air, possibly higher, with a ground wire attached to a ground rod of twenty feet or more.

Image below from Hammacher Schlemmer online.

This is the result of a study in which the above example had the ground wire interrupted by a measuring device. It was discovered that as the storm approached, current was observed traveling at an increasing volume, reaching a peak appropriate to the arrival, tapering away as the clouds departed.

There was math involved with respect to the height of the tree but as one might expect, the protection is greatest at the apex of the tower and tapers away with distance.

There are a few commercial operations selling this type of protection, LBA Group being one I found with a quick search. All references below including photos are from this linked site.

The site has a section named Area protection for fixed and portable assets.

"Typical applications include camps, portable vehicles or buildings."

My obviously faulty memory believed that the shape of the curve from the apex to the ground was an inverted hyperbola, but the above image shows that to be inaccurate.

Barely visible in this next photo is what is named as a UL-listed streamer retarding air terminal. It still appears to be a smaller wire tipped christmas tree, but maybe more like a duster made from pointy wire. If you can incorporate a fuzzy bottle brush made from pointed wires and put it really high in the air and provide a deep ground rod (minimum ten feet, my preference) you may find some protection. You could attach an inductive ammeter to the ground wire and exclaim with excitement as the storm approaches and the needle (analog?) climbs to the peak capacity of the meter.

Anecdote: the local airport has placed extremely high wind shear monitoring towers in the area. One of them is about a quarter mile from my house, as the crow flies. Since the tower, with the appropriate lightning dissipating device atop, has been installed, we've not received lightning strikes within that quarter mile or more. Somewhat of a bonus, but the thing is so tall it requires FAA aircraft lighting, also visible for great distances.

I would not care to be the test case, but I suppose the possibility exists that one could create a Faraday cage/Faraday sleeping bag to protect oneself. The occupants of an enclosed motor vehicle can survive a strike, as the charge travels through/around the outside of the vehicle. Tesla coil demonstrations often involve a metal mesh covered human performing while being struck by the high voltage from the coil.

Answer 2

an eight foot tall, 3/4" diameter copper rod about a foot into the ground at a spot about six feet away from the back of my tent

While this would reduce the likelihood of a direct strike, it would greatly increase the risk of a strike 6 foot away from your tent. That's still close enough to cause at least temporary hearing injury, and possibly worse.

If your tent is metal structured, this may still be a reasonable tradeoff, as the metal structure itself will be attracting lightning anyway. The dissipative end structure suggested by fred_dot_u is a good idea, but it's hard to know how effective it will be in particular situation.

Alternative setup would be to have a thick copper cable (like car battery starter cable) running over the top of the tent and into a ground rod at each end. The idea here would be to avoid any pointy metal objects, which concentrate the electric field and give rise to lightning leaders. If a strike were to occur anyway, the copper cable would redirect it around the people who are inside.

I stumbled upon this research paper The concept of using the tent structure as a measure of protection against lightning which also suggests omitting any sharp spikes. It adds a conductive mesh underneath the tent, which is meant to avoid any ground currents from affecting the people inside.