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
“I wonder how long it will be before Al Gore tries to blame ball lightning on “dirty weather”?”
On the contrary, Anthony…Based on a very unscientific summation of the responses to this article, AGW seems to have put an end to ball lightning. Almost all witnesses report seeing ball lightning ‘a long time ago’, with no reports in the last 15-20 years! Oh, the devastation of no ball lightning! We must send Al all our money so he can save us from the lack of ball lightning!
/sarc off/
Those lightning balls looks very similar to UFO movies that you see from time to time. Myabe many of those UFO’s that have been seen are simply just lightning balls?
I remember reading about those mysterious balls when I was a kid and how they have scared people, especially a hundred years ago or more when the knowledge of how the physics works was much less than today.
If they are real, which I think they probably are since there are so many reports of them all over the world, they are also the reason for many “UFO” observations.
It’s hearsay I suppose, but I had an uncle who was struck by ball lightning on a farm. He did not know what had happened but his teenage son saw it. Lightning hit a tree and a glowing ball came floating down the hill, passing through my uncle’s body. He was knocked unconscious, and paralysed for a (short?) time. Being Australian farmers in that generation, they did not even call a doctor. He went back to work and lived to a decent age. X-rays some years after the incident showed some atrophy in internal organs on the side of his body where he was hit.
Only time I can recall balls of fire, was when I used Dencorub in the wrong place.
The best explanation I have heard is that this is the artifact of a lightning strike on the retina in the back of your eye. It is so bright that it is retained for several seconds and you see a ball (spot or dot) of light wherever you look – as your eyes gaze in a different direction then the ball moves…. pretty obvious really!
You get the same effect from looking too long too closely in the direction of the sun.
Occam’s Razor suggests that the above is the best and most plausible explanation, as it explains why ball lightening appears to travels through windows and walls.
The frequency of the occurrence of ball lightning (and of other UFOs) seems to be inverse to the increasing ubiquity (and quality) of video cameras. A curious characteristic.
Some of these images were clearly flares being dropped at intervals from military aircraft, probably in training exercises.
One summer in the late 1980s or early 1990s I was outside at my parents place in Clarkston Heights, WA when a thunderstorm quickly blew in from the east (usually they always come from the southwest). As the storm front moved across the Snake River from the Lewiston, ID side, my dad and I observed two or three gysers shoot up 6 to 10 feet high from the surface of the river. (There was no visible lightening associated with these gysers.) As the front approached our house, we saw translucent, blue, basketball-sized ball lightening bouncing along the ground experiencing decreasing kinetic and potential energies in their bounces under the influence of gravity. A baseball sized ball came through the air and suddenly stopped at the top of a metal post on a chain-link fence no more than 20 feet in front of me. It quickly disappeared within a few seconds. Needless to say we both were very excited to have witnessed such a rare event. I’ve never witnessed anything like that before or since.
Anthony Watts stated :
“1. The word Explanation is misspelled.”
Maybe not though, because in an article in the Huffington Post
written by Robert S. McElvaine, Posted: September 29, 2008 12:59 AM,
he explains that ……
“Whatever else the 2008 presidential campaign may produce, it has given us a new word: ExPalination. Someday it may take its place in our language alongside malapropism and Bushism. …. in the Katie Couric interview on CBS, Palin was repeatedly put in situations where she had no answer and said, in effect: Well, let me exPalin that to you, Katie.”
So then if the “Journal of Geophysical Research” have an “Expalination”, then maybe it is because they don’t have an answer for the question of what is Ball Lightning.
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-s-mcelvaine/expalination_b_130113.html]
However …… In an article by Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News
January 22, 2007 ……
“Ball Lightning Mystery Solved? Electrical Phenomenon Created in Lab”
Physicist Antonio Pavão and doctoral student Gerson Paiva of the Federal University of Pernambuco have created orbs of electricity about the size of golf balls that mimic natural ball lightning
[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/01/070122-ball-lightning.html]
My father saw ball lightning when he was a kid. It exploded in the garden and left a hole in the ground. The next day he jumped into the hole. It was knee deep.
A friend of mine saw it in the late ’60s together together with her parents. It entered the kitchen through the closed window during a thunderstorm and was about the size of a grape fruit. It traveled slowly through the air as if it knew exactly where to go: the light bulb in the middle of the room – which exploded with an extremely loud bang.
I only saw them telling the story…
My brother (whose knowledge of physics surpasses my own) informed me that the EM field equations (aka Maxwell’s Equations) support quasi-stable solutions (mathematically ‘solitons’) when the plasma charge density is sufficiently high that the non-linearity of the dielectric and polarizability properties of air come into play. The charge then leaks off slowly until the polarized boundary layer around the plasma sphere weakens enough to allow the sphere to expand adiabatically, dissipating with a literal ‘bang.’
Totally off topic. mostly. please delete at your discretion mods.
but this is a true story from my days as a radar technician.
Everyone is familiar with a glass or a shiny surface flashing brightly in the distance ? sometimes it can be blinding. Well the same thing happens with a radar signal. If a tech needs to set up a strong signal for a dish to latch onto, he would use a ‘corner reflector’, and this would guarantee a strong signal for the dish to home in on.
We had aircraft fly in towing drones in figure of eight circuits. We had missile batteries firing live missiles at the drones.
We had safety officers with their fingers on the self destruct.
What we didnt realise we had, were ‘ corner reflectors’
Seems that for a certain length tow cable, for a certain length figure of eight, for a certain diameter of cable, for a certain angle off the horizon
the tow cable itself would act as a VERY bright radar signal. and a tracking radar will follow the bright target
and so I witnessed the following traffic
pilot -Plane on range.
pilot-Drone deployed
Missile battery – target aqcuired
Range safety officer – target is drone. ok to go.
Missile battery – tracking, tracking , tracking
Missile battery – in range. IFF neg. ready to fire
Range safety officer – wait
Range safety officer – wait
pilot -er.. wait ? wait why
Range safety officer – wait
Range safety officer – wait . we appear to be tracking the wire. not the drone
pilot -er.. er.. tell them. tell them now
Range safety officer – ok missile battery, locked on aircraft , abort this one please
crackle
crackle
pilot -er.. er.. whats happening
Missile battery – missile away
Range safety officer – ugghhnnn
Range safety officer – jjjj eee, ….self destruct. fail safe pilot. fail safe
Range safety officer -missile HAS self destructed
looongg delay
pilot – can someone tell those ****** i am pulling this drone, not pushing it
Never saw it myself, but I was on duty one dark and stormy night in the control tower at an Air Force base in Malaysia in the 60s. During a particularly violent passage of a tropical thunderstorm right over the base, the duty controller in the tower cab itself made a particularly panic-stricken squawk over the intercom and, after what seemed to be no more than seconds, crashed through the ops room door having descended the 60-odd feet from the tower cab to the ground floor almost without touching the steps.
He stated that a lightning ball had “entered” via one of the tower cab windows (effectively a double-glazed, sloping glass wall), danced across the top of the control console right in front of him before “exiting” through an opposite window. He was not normally a hysterical type, but he verged on hysterical that night. We wondered whether the normally high level of static electricity in the relatively very dry air-conditioned control tower atmosphere might have played some part of it.
Go fast backward a hundred years or so….
and think about stories of tornados and tsunamies.
Obvious crazy stuff. No good documentation, very few reliable witnesses..
Think what a difference our technology (and the internet — just look at the very believable multiple stories on this one thread!) has made!
It’s hard to deny reality when it bites y’in th’ arse!
– MJM
I wonder how many sitings of ‘ball lightning’ can be attributed to other causes, such as remnant burning embers (e.g. wood) from a struck object (e.g. as when welding or as ‘sparklers’ shed), retinal burn or “latent image retention” in the eyeball (from a bright light source as from a nearby lightning strike discharge), sightings of far-off power transformers or lines (or the surge suppressors) ‘lighting up’ (igniting or arcing after being struck) just to name a few causes that might be interpreted as a ball lightning occurrence.
Then we are left with those cases which are a little harder to explain, where two or more people witness the same event and relate the same details e.g. pilot and co-pilot accounts during encounters in aircraft …
The only tale I can recount is witnessing storm-induced ‘discharge’ from antenna leads as a kid (St. Elmo’s Fire); the 300 ohm twin-lead from my off-center fed Windom dipole arcing to water pipes and any other ‘grounded’ object while a thunderstorm was in the vicinity! (I was unaware of the means to properly assure a static electricity ‘discharge path’ through a high-valued resistor to ground from the antenna leads at that point in my life!)
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Ball lightning … caught on tape?
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Here’s one I would attribute to a distant strike on an object (perhaps a strike that ignites a power pole ‘pig’ transformer full of oil):
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Unusual horizontal “Jacob’s Ladder” – power line acing laterally along a power line (note the 60 Hz sound on the sound track: characteristic of power line arcing) – seen form further away this might be mistaken for a ‘phenomenon of nature’:
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Perhaps there are more Ball Lightning events that are not observed as being such, as caught here by an observant film maker/videographer in the clouds (before descending?):
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High-speed photography of a lightning event showing plasma spheroids (ball lightning?)
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G. Karst says:
October 19, 2012 at 9:19 am
Well, In-Q-Tel (founded by Gilman Louie) did invest money in a company that was working on discharging a capacitor bank through an ion channel made by a laser. Effectively a directed energy pulse. Last I heard, they were figuring out how to zap IEDs with it.
There is this theory that all spherical so called particles of the cosmos are in fact some form of spherical standing wave of energy. The theory is based on the inherent pressure of the energy frequency continuum of the quantum vacuum, ie. Zero Point Energy. However the principle explained for the Electron in the following link would apply to all fluidic energy with the ultimate size of the sphere being being determined by the cutoff wavelength of the frequencies involved.
http://mwolff.tripod.com/point.html
So my guess is that Ball Lightning is an example of a Spherical Standing Wave of Plasma.
If AFTER a nearby lightening strike certainly some reports are just retinal after-images. Move your eyes and the “spots” would apprear to move across the landscape. Then they shortly disappear.
People with “floaters” in their retinal fluid, when the floaters are off-center, find themselves trying to center their eyes on the floater — which continually seems to move as they turn their eyes and even their heads to “follow it”.
Of course, I am only talking about those reports of ball lightening AFTER a nearby lightening strike. One possibility for some of such.
Eugene WR Gallun
There does not seem to be one simple explanation for ball lightning. Of the examples discussed and shown here, there seem to be a variety of types. Some forms are very bright and directly connected to lightning strikes. Finding stable conditions, boundary layers, and the necessary high voltages in the atmosphere, whatever the real explanation is, either outdoors or indoors probably helps to differentiate the types and activity of these strange phenomenon. From entrained plasma clouds to bight active balls that go bang there is no doubt in my mind that we are seeing real activity.
My experience was of a very short lived “gaseous” ball that formed near a old fashioned power drop into an old building. The dual 100 volt insulated line came through the wall from the outside into some glass insulators that were about 2 inches apart. This was in rural Japan in the summer with high humidity, threatening rain and there was lightning in the neighborhood. I do not remember any unusual sounds. The whole thing was completely visual.
A small ball (softball size) of very filmy gaseous like “fire” basically rolled from the ceiling down the hall toward me and dissipated before it got to me. My impression of the color was a ghost like white that was bright enough to easily be seen in the overcast afternoon light inside the hallway. There were windows at this end of the hall so my surroundings were well lit. This ball was not as bright as the numerous outdoor images shown in this post. It was more a glow. It did seem to roll and fluctuate as it moved toward me perhaps 2 or 3 feet in 2 or 3 seconds. I had an impression of a trailing visible small “gaseous” tail. No sound of heated air, in fact it was oddly quiet during the whole thing. It was there and then gone. There was no sense of danger probably because it happened so quickly. It came to within just a few feet of me. I had never experienced anything like it before nor since. But there is no doubt that I saw something very close to what I have described above. It was unsettling and I did quickly question what I might be seeing. But I have no doubt that it really happened.
Sorry I cannot explain it very well since my knowledge of plasma physics is limited to watching flame fronts in fire and candles. Very impressive to me and similar but a bit different from what I am confident was an experience that I had with ball lightning.
In my post at 12:02 I specifically said it could not have been a retinal afterimage; the ball did not follow my gaze when I looked away at a friend (who also saw it). And it did not change color like a retinal afterimage does. It stayed orange.
Atom tells the bartender “I’m missing an electron”.
Bartender says “are you sure?”
Atom says “I’m positive”.
Okay, in the tradition of Occam’s Razor (‘the simplest, most direct explanation or rationale is most often the correct one’) I’ve come to the conclusion that the ball lightning phenom is a remnant ‘product’ of a stepped downward ‘leader’ that failed to ‘terminate’ in a discharge path either to earth or another charge center/area within the thunderstorm. As can be seen in the 5th (or last) video I posted above, one such instance of a leader not reaching ground can be observed with an associated ‘afterglow’.
With temperatures in the lightning channel reaching that of the sun, perhaps a bit of hot-fusion is taking place briefly (while the ‘ball’ remains ‘hot’ anyway) and this may account for a few things, including what might be described as the capability to release phenomenal amounts of energy and accomplish such things as blowing holes in the ground or making a ‘path’ (which might only be a fraction of a mil diameter) for itself through glass and other obstacles (like panels, partitions) that might be in its path …
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When I learned about soliton solutions to differential equations my curiosity about ball lightning diminished.
Solitons are non periodic solutions of the potentials and fields that fulfill the differential equations, thus allowing conditions for self sustained large wave packets.
The soliton hypothesis has been proposed for this phenomenon.
According to this theory, outdoor ball lightning is caused by an atmospheric maser– analogous to a laser, but operating at a much lower energy–having a volume of the order of many cubic kilometers.
“In technical terms, the maser is generated by a population inversion induced in the rotational energy levels of the water molecules by the short field pulse associated with streak lightning. The large volume of air that is affected by the strike makes it difficult for photons to escape before they cause ‘microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation’ (the maser effect). Unless the volume of air is very large or else is enclosed in a conducting cavity (as is the case of ball lightning in airplanes or submarines and to a certain degree also indoors), collisions between the molecules will consume all the energy of the population inversion. If the volume is large, the maser can generate a localized electrical field or soliton that gives rise to the observed ball lightning. Such a discharge has not yet been created in the laboratory, however.
During the summer of 2011, in the mountains of northern New Mexico, my husband observed ball lightning in the house. We had been having lightning storms several times a week during that summer. It was daytime, and it was raining. A lightning strike appeared to hit either the roof, or just outside in the yard. A ball of lightning appeared in the living room, just a few feet away from his chair. It existed for just a few seconds, and then exploded with small electrical lightnings going in all directions for several feet. He said it sounded like a shotgun going off. Scared the snot out of him, and he isn’t easily scared.
I am grateful for all the accounts of ball lightning here as they have given me an explanation for something I saw in the early night sky over Fredericton, N.B. during the summer in the late 1980s. My husband was driving us, heading towards the St. John River valley from the north side, when I saw a ball of light moving slowly to the east over the south side, and it appeared on two or three occasions that smaller balls of light were ‘dropped’ from this ball. It probably lasted half a minute before disappearing. My husband was too busy driving to see it. I decided the only explanation must have been something to do with nearby Canadian Forces Base Gagetown, but the object did not seem big enough to be any vehicle.
It took reading quite a few of other accounts here, with a definite envious emotion, before it clicked that indeed, ‘people just don’t realize what it is when they see it’, and I count as one of those people.