Super-slow-motion footage from recent Florida storm
From the FLORIDA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
MELBOURNE, FLA. — Scientists at Florida Institute of Technology used a high-speed camera to capture an amazing lighting flash from a May 20 storm near the university’s Melbourne campus.
The flash was recorded at 7,000 frames per second (FPS). The playback speed seen in the video is 700 FPS.
The video was captured as part of the process of testing the camera for its ultimate use, which will be centered on capturing and studying the dynamics and energetics of the upward electrical discharges from thunderstorms known as starters, jets and gigantic jets.
Principal Investigator Ningyu Liu from the Geospace Physics Laboratory in Florida Tech’s Department of Physics and Space Sciences is available for interviews.
The lightning flash captured here happened during a May 20 storm not far from the Florida Tech campus in Melbourne. It was recorded at 7,000 frames per second using a high-speed camera.
Video courtesy of the Geospace Physics Laboratory, Department of Physics and Space Sciences, Florida Institute of Technology.
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Wow… Cool…
http://www.rockyhigh66.org/stuff/lightning_return_stroke.gif
The discharge flash of the return stroke at 0:14 is just amazing.
That is awesome.
Is it really necessary to explain that the 7000 fps video was shot with a high speed camera? Just nit picking.
Cool stuff… I’d like to see the 7K playback, though.
So I count 27 frames for the leader to reach the ground. At 7000 frames per sec, and assuming a cloud base of about 500 ft, that’s roughly 130,000 feet per sec coming down. I wager the 500 ft estimate is low, so could be upwards of 200,000 fps going down.
Very cool. How did they trigger the camera?
Wonderful!
Looks like the clouds are teasing/tickling the Earth. Nice kick Earth!
Can you get just the return stroke event slowed down to a playback rate of, say, 70 fps? (or even 7 fps), That might be interesting.
Interesting – I read somewhere that lightning that strikes the earth actually starts from the ground up. Looks like that theory is wrong.
I must have read that on the internet…
Love these videos…now I’m wondering how scientifically literate kids are…that is, if they know it connects via the earth “returning fire” 🙂
This is great! Thank you for posting this. I love these sort of shots.
We are in a cloud chamber…. and see the secondary particles making ionised pathways. The question is what ‘generate’ the high potential in the first place… my (un-qualified!) theory is the Sun-Earth interaction.
Charged particles constantly ‘hit’ the top of the atmosphere charging it … and when the cosmic high energy particles hit, the secondary effect is ‘shorting’ the ‘circuit’ to the ground…. still, this not explaind the Jets and other misterious stuff 🙂
Studying :” the upward electrical discharges from thunderstorms known as starters, jets and gigantic jets”
Is that the same thing as “sprites?” If so then I wonder how far our electric and magnetic fields reach out and how much of an interaction between the two exists ( and who knows how many more “fields” actually interact like gravity and so on)
Gaia, meet Zeus.
This is so cool… I have been watching lightning all my life. I even had a close encounter (about 30 feet from tree that was struck). My wife had her car struck by lightning while going over a hill at 70 Mph on an interstate – I didn’t even know cars could be struck – it melted the antennae, the cable up to the radio, and fried all the electronics. No one was hurt – just scared silly.
Its like watching something magical.
Great vids and gif
The consistency of width in the plasma is interesting
Plasma in space experiment.
Some results at the end look rather like galaxy formation on a small scale, unfortunately the commentary is Russian, one even produces a double helix form
https://youtu.be/kanYuBptuZ0
I like empirical experiments, the experiment above creates this with plasma
http://spacepaintings.yolasite.com/resources/NebuloasaADN.jpg.opt650x909o0,0s650x909.jpg
This is mostly plasma, no need for dark matter if there is this much plasma in space, there is your missing matter
http://www.lunataker.de/Galerie/2001-21-a-1280_wallpaper.jpg
These guys are crazy, Generating a lighting ball from a streak lighting
nicely captured…………
On the other thread Carla (WUWT regular) posted this link
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/3/034006/meta
Lightning in the Mediterranean and its relation with sea-surface temperature
the area I know well.
Is there a theory on why the leaders spiral?
I tend to to think of spin being induced by physical interaction, not electrical resistance. Are the leaders acting like a flow of physical particles pushing against the air molecules, and spinning?
This might be duplicate. I can’t tell what happens on this tablet.
While we are on the topic of electrical discharges, any one know of a good popular science book that talks about thunderstorms and atmospheric electrical discharges? Its a fascinating topic from the point of view of history, destructiveness, power, variety, recent discoveries, and apparently lack of clear understanding of what causes them.
Yes, by physical I meant mechanical or kinetic vs electrical potential. My limited understanding was that the leaders followed charge gradients until an ideal path was established. I would have expected those leaders to smooth, not fluttering.
So I suspect magnetic fields as above are why lightening is of equal width in the main strike, there are fractal offshoots of less energy and as a result smaller magnetic fields, so thinner branches to strikes.
Without the magnetic field there would be no uniformity to a lightening strike