"This was unusual and a little bit different than what is generally thought in the literature," Tran said.Īnd no one at the lightning lab has ever seen an upward leader turn on its path toward the ground, the researchers report. Instead, the researchers saw a rare glimpse of streamers, positively charged electrical channels stretching upward from the ground. The detailed video of the Gainesville lightning never showed a hot, bright upwards leader. University of Florida Lightning Observatory in Gainesville The upward-bending tip on the second lightning stroke that was captured can't be explained by current physics. Lightning's flash is actually a return stroke, as the electric current races back up the stepped leader. The two collide in a violent, high-energy discharge. As the leader, or charge, nears the surface, a strong opposite charge builds in the ground, reaching upward meet the leader. The leader searches blindly for the ground, branching out through open air. Here's the basic model for how cloud-to-ground lightning works: A positive or (more commonly) negative charge jumps from the cloud, tracing a path called a stepped leader. Lightning is one of the deadliest yet least understood weather phenomena, according to the National Weather Service. But we are doing more observations so we can hopefully shed some light on the physics behind lightning." "We don't know whether we can call this rarely observed or common. "The mechanisms of how a lightning flash strikes an object are still very poorly understood," said lead study author Manh Tran, a doctoral student at the University of Florida. The lightning flash skipped some of the key steps that researchers have worked out for how lightning travels from cloud to ground. It often indicates a user profile.Ī high-speed camera run by the University of Florida's Lightning Research Laboratory caught an unusual bolt from the blue that zapped some trees in Gainesville on June 8, 2013. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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