Video catches split second before intense lightning strike
By Nicoletta Lanese - Staff Writer 10 hours ago
Caught on high-speed video, lightning streamers of opposite polarity
approach and connect in this sequence of video frames, slowed by more
than 10,000-fold. The common streamer zone appears in the last two
frames before the whiteout of the lightning flash. This lasted about 0.00003
seconds at full speed.
(Image: © Jiang et al/Geophysical Research Letters/AGU)
Electrifying video footage has captured the moment just before lightning strikes, when thin tendrils of electricity reach down from the sky and up from the ground, until they collide with a dramatic flash.
Using a high-speed camera, researchers captured images of lightning as it struck a 1,066-foot-tall (325 meters) meteorology
tower in Beijing. Two consecutive frames, each lasting 2.63 microseconds, show the moment when the downward-reaching and upward-reaching fingers of the lightning bolt suddenly touch, releasing a massive electrical discharge and a bright flash of light.
The images shed light on the so-called breakthrough phase, the instant when the lightning fingers begin to approach each other but have not yet connected. This is one of the "most poorly understood processes in lightning physics," but it's critical for understanding where the lightning will ultimately strike, the authors wrote in a report published Feb. 1 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
These high-speed video frames catch the moment of connection between a negatively-charged lightning leader
reaching down from a cloud and positively-charged leader reaching up from the tip (blue triangle) of a meteorology
tower in Beijing, China. Each frame lasts 2.63 microseconds (0.0000263 seconds).
(Image credit: Jiang et al/Geophysical Research Letters/AGU)
"The target of the lightning strike is not determined at the beginning when it initiates from the cloud," study co-author Rubin Jiang, an atmospheric physicist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Laboratory for Middle Atmosphere and Global Environment Observation, said in a statement. The breakthrough phase "is the process that eventually determines the object that's struck by the lightning flash."
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