From the American Chemical Society New insights into the 1-in-a-million lightning called ‘ball lightning’ One of the rare scientific reports on the rarest form of lightning — ball lightning — describes better ways of producing this mysterious phenomenon under the modern laboratory conditions needed to explain it. The new study on a phenomenon that puzzled…
From the Science China Press Is there gigantic jet event in middle latitude region in mainland China? When talking about lightning, appearances of different lightning which occur along with thunderstorms will emerge in the minds of the people and these lightning occur in the troposphere. However, in addition to lightning in the troposphere, there are…
While we all know ‘global warming’ to be our major source of headaches here at WUWT, this from the University of Cincinnati Academic Health Center , suggests lightning is also a cause. To me, this is something that seems too statistically small to be real, especially when dealing with human subjects. Further, since thunderstorms produce…
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…
Why being in a car during a lightning storm is the safest place to be As watcher of weather, both as as a one-time storm chaser as well as a person who gets sent email about weather of all kinds, I’ll have to say I’ve never seen anything like this video. The National Weather Service…
From the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center High above the clouds during thunderstorms, some 50 miles above Earth a different kind of lightning dances. Bursts of red and blue light, known as “sprites,” flash for a scant one thousandth of a second. They are often only visible to those in flight above a storm, and happen…
From the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Science nugget: Lightning signature could help reveal the solar system’s origins Every second, lightning flashes some 50 times on Earth. Together these discharges coalesce and get stronger, creating electromagnetic waves circling around Earth, to create a beating pulse between the ground and the lower ionosphere, about 60 miles up…
By WUWT regular “Just The Facts” With the help of an array of WUWT reader comments, which began on this thread on January, 15th 2011, and grew on January 22nd, 2011, February 10th, 2011, February 28th, 2011, June 30th, 2011 and January 21st, 2012, I have been compiling a summary of all potential climatic variables…
From Spaceweather.com: You know what comes out of the bottom of a thunder storm–lightning. But do you know what comes out of the top? On Sept. 28th at 7:01 am EDT, Joel Gonzalez photographed a gigantic jet shooting up from a storm near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Click on the image to watch the action–and…
From Eurka Alert: FECYT – Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology A team of Spanish researchers has made a high-speed recording of elves and sprites in storms, fleeting and luminous electric phenomena produced in the upper layers of the atmosphere. Their analysis of these observations has been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.