I wonder how long it will be before Al Gore tries to blame ball lightning on “dirty weather”? A neat video follows. From CSIRO:
Goodness, gracious, great balls of lightning
Sightings of balls of lightning have been made for centuries around the world – usually the size of a grapefruit and lasting up to twenty seconds – but no explanation of how it occurs has been universally accepted by science. Even more mysterious are sightings of balls of lightning forming on glass and appearing in homes and in aeroplanes.
CSIRO scientist John Lowke has been studying ball lightning since the sixties. He’s never seen it, but has spoken to eye witnesses and in a new scientific paper(paywalled at AGU, don’t bother) he gives the first mathematical solution explaining the birth of ball lightning – and how it can pass through glass.
Previous theories have cited microwave radiation from thunderclouds, oxidising aerosols, nuclear energy, dark matter, antimatter, and even black holes as possible causes. John disputes these theories.
He proposes ball lightning is caused when leftover ions (electric energy), which are very dense, are swept to the ground following a lightning strike. As for how they pass through glass, he says this is a result of a stream of ions accumulating on the outside of a glass window and the resulting electric field on the other side excites air molecules to form a ball discharge.
According to John ball lightning is rare, but it has been witnessed in Australia many times. People just don’t realise what it is when they see it.
NOTE: This video was provided by CSIRO in their press release. I don’t agree that all of the scenes in the video are relevant to the issue. Take it with a grain of salt. Anthony
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For the record, here is what I sent to CSIRO:
Dear Simon,
I’m writing to complain about what I consider a sloppy job related to this press release as it appears on Eurekalert:
Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres
Expalination for ball lightning
Australian scientists have unveiled a new theory which explains the mysterious phenomenon known as ball lightning.
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
Contact: Simon Hunter
61-395-458-412
1. The word Explanation is misspelled.
2. The title of the paper is not given, forcing anyone who wants to read it to have to figure out what it is by searching JGR.
3. The link to the paper immediately goes to a login page. Paywalls and press releases don’t work well together. At least provide the abstract if the paper is paywalled.
4. As I understand it, CSIRO is a publicly funded agency, so it would make more sense and be in the public interest to make a full copy of the paper available on the CSIRO website.
There has been a trend elsewhere for this sort of incompleteness in conveying science to the public, so I feel I must point it out.
Thank you for your consideration.
Anthony Watts
WUWT
When I was a young lad, I witnessed ball lighting. A lightning strike had hit an apple tree in
our back yard in upstate New York. The tree was cleaved in two and from the still standing section four or five luminous balls about the size of beach balls came dancing down towards the ground, fluttering about, getting smaller all the while, by the time I could catch my Grandfathers attention
they had disappeared; but I saw itt plain as day!
Tesla’s Thoughts on Ball Lightning Production:
http://home.dmv.com/~tbastian/files/balllite.txt
Tesla’s Production of Electric Fireballs:
http://home.dmv.com/~tbastian/ball.htm
Give me a break! That object around 0:40-0:50 is a BIRD. You can see the wings flapping!
GeoLurking says:
October 19, 2012 at 9:08 am
…The rest of them seem to be common UFOs.
My thoughts too. Objects of unknown identity, therefore essentially UFOs in the literal sense (which is not to say little green men from Mars, necessarily).
Saw ball lightning way back in 1975. Huge bolt of lightening struck the Ironbridge here in Shropshire and a ball came crackling off it. Was so weird. Down in a deep (400′) valley yet there it was. It fizzed and hummed for about a minute or so. Was about the size of an apple and it just disappeared in a puff. Wish I had a camera.
One day my wife and I were standing in the front doorway while it was raining outside. After a close lightning strike, we saw a ball of light about the size of a volley ball that was traveling along the power lines in front of the house. It was like a globe of plasma that was just dancing along the wire. When it reached the power pole it slowly went down the pole and stayed on the ground doing it little dance routine (like it was discharging into the ground or something). Altogether it lasted about 30 seconds. It acted as if it were charged and as it touched things the discharge would keep it moving along. I thought that was something called Saint Elmo’s Fire.
In 20 years of flying on Air Force RC-135’s I”ve experienced ball lighting twice. Both times it formed in the front of the aircraft and slowly moved past all the electronics to the rear of the aircraft and then just disappeared. Nobody quite had the nerve to do anything but sit still and watch but it was pretty exciting! I’m not sure how a bird at 35,000 feet making 350 knots plays in to the idea of dense leftover electrons falling to the ground, but ball lighting and St Elmo’s fire are two of the coolest things you will ever see!
Third person experience, but a good one:
30 years ago I’m sitting in an Aircraft Systems class at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University when the instructor, ex USAF, related a story of him piloting a military version of a DC-6 with a load of Scottish para-troopers. They were in transit, not jumping. All were wearing kilts, sitting down both sides of the aircraft facing the center aisle, as para-troopers do. He said he was watching St Elmo’s fire dancing on the propellers; more than usual. Then a “ball of electricity” rose from the throttles at the cockpit pedestal and “bounced” down the center aisle clear to the rear of the passenger compartment, turned around and bounced back forward and went back down the throttle quadrant where it came from. He said shortly after this there was a great flash of light outside. The reaction of the kilted Scotsmen was the punchline to the story. They all pinched their knees tight at the sight of this ball.
He said it was St Elmo’s fire (static electricity). I always thought of ball lightning. I wondered if they were the same phenomenon.
The video has an interesting explanation about these balls:
;-))
GeoLurking says (October 19, 2012 at 9:08 am)
The rest of them seem to be common UFOs…
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Don’t mention UFOs! Uncle Sigmund Lew will be pointing and shouting “told you so!” at us. 🙂
There was a fellow back in the not-quite early days of cold fusion who was looking into creating ball lighting as a plasma confinement mechanism for fusion power. I haven’t heard about his work in ages, but he was very active on USENET for a while.
While trying to see what happened with his “plasmoids,” I happened across:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmoid (way too brief)
http://jlnlabs.online.fr/plasma/gmr/index.htm (don’t try this at home. Oh wait, it is a home experiment. Try it at your friend’s home or in your employer’s microwave oven!)
Oh, here we go. Paul M Koloc, and plasmak.
http://www.neoteric-research.org/ (The two .pdfs are interesting, much more interesting than the CSIRO stuuf, I’m sure.)
http://www.prometheus2.net/ (bad link, though I got it from Google. DNS says it’s good until 2014, so likely server problem.)
My father was a radio operator in the merchant marine pre WW2. He talked on several occasions about the ball lighning he would witness on shipboard, running up and down the long wire antennas that were rigged between masts. Apparently quite common at sea. Also, I remember there was at one time a USAF “Ball Lightning Research Station” along the Interstate [best I remember] west of Salt Lake City. Don’t know if it still exists or not but would be interesting to dig and see if any papers were released in the public domain.
Anthony, I appreciate and enjoy your fine work with this website. meaux
Stop! I’ve wanted to see ball lightning ever since I first read about it, probably in “Stranger than Science” back when I was 12 or 13. It’s no fair that so many readers have seen it. No fair at all! Pout! /rant
It’s likely why I took an interest in Koloc’s studies.
One night in 1965 over the US in an Air Force B-52G the nose of the aircraft was aglow with St Elmo’s fire. Suddenly a glowing ball about 3 inches diameter leaped out of the APR-14 receiver antenna connection and crossed to my right and went out through the gunners radar circuit breaker panel blowing all the circuits, leaving behind a puff of smoke. There was a loud bang when it exited out the circuit breaker panel. Total time was about 3 seconds. The nose of the B-52 continued to glow with St Elmo’s fire for several hours and the gunner’s radar display was dead for the rest of the flight.
Feel free to “panic” me whenever you like, I approve of your method of soothing.
Forget the beef about the paywalled paper. The video by itself was way cool to watch.
Thanks for that one!
I saw those many times while at University. Usually VERY early on Sat and/or Sun. mornings while “walking” home to go to bed. They were obviously much more active in the 80’s so AGW has slowed them down. Haven’t noticed them as much since my days of higher education ended. 🙂
Cheers
45 years ago, my grandmother claims that a ball of lightening floated outside of her kitchen window and then came through the open screen and hit her. My mom, saw how her arm had the hair burnt off one side of her forearm and upper arm. And outside of the kitchen the screen was singed in what appeared to be a circular segment.
I had a physics teacher assert that, because of the very points you make, that “ball lightening” was a myth. I kept my mouth shut because not that long before, I had been watching ball lightening or a UFO or something very bright against a black, cloudy night sky with a telescope. It passed between my window and a distant tree, so I guessed at a size of around a football to a soccer ball. I really would like a genuine explanation.
I saw it as a kid in the mid 60’s, watching a thunderstorm on a mountain ridge visible from my grandparents’ porch. Several rapid bolts of lightning hit the ridge, then there was an orange ball floating slowly over the treetops, fading after about 10 seconds. And no, it wasn’t an optical afterimage: when I looked away it stayed where it was on the ridge.
Interesting video. Bizarre soundtrack.
My Dad tells a story about seeing a ball lightning floating down the exact center of a valley in the California Bay Area. He said it was the size of a large beach ball , and that it came to a dead stop directly across from him, hovered for a few seconds and then went on its merry way.
Some of the scientific books on lightning have chapters on ball lightning. Apparently it’s as common as regular lightning but is visible over a much shorter distance; hence far more people have seen regular lightning than ball.
Steve C says
“At last, an explanation of ball lightning. Males around the world can now hope that doctors will soon find an effective treatment for this painful and debilitating condition.’
There was a man named Glass
He had balls that were made out of Brass
When he rubbed them together
They played “Stormy Weather”
And lightning shot out of his…
Well you know the rest. 🙂
Our local police went to investigate some ball lightning. They arrested it, took it back to the police station where they charged it and then put it in a cell.
To re-iterate Lowke’s point, for those of us who are asking how an ionised mass can stay together. It probably doesn’t. It is not about any mass staying together, it is about a focus of ionisation moving along with the charge in the ground. Much of the paper discusses the propagation of charge following the lightning strike. Imagine yourself burning wood or paper by focussing sunlight on it with a looking glass. You can cause the flame to move by shifting the looking glass; as you do so, you don’t have explain what you see by suggesting any movement of the burning mass. That’s the closest analogy I can come up with; hope it sheds some light on Lowke’s proposition, which seems to be much closer to plausible than any theory I’ve heard of so far.