High-speed camera lightning on YT

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dan Robinson
  • Start date Start date
Whoa. That's pretty much the coolest thing I've seen this month. Can't decide whether video one or video four is the most impressive.
 
Yeah, agreed they are legit (and not to mention awesome). I am doing some lightning research here at OU and we are using a high-speed camera to capture nearby CGs - the video I have seen looks just like the patterns in these clips, especially the first one. Amazing stuff.
 
The third video is showing the same lightning bolt over and over I think.
I believe the fifth video is showing the same bolt twice.
Other than that, they are pretty impressive.
 
In the first video, you can actually see the return stroke moving back up the main channel once the stepped leader connects. I have never seen nor heard about the short little sparks popping randomly off of the stepped leader as it propagates.

The third video is showing a cloud-to-ground discharge to a tower (not the typical upward-moving lightning seen with towers). The upward leader initiating off of the tower to meet the stepped leader is visible! The video apparently shows all of the return strokes in the discharge.

The fourth video is the most intriguing of all of them, apparently an 'anvil-crawler' like discharge with a CG connection. You can identify the normal cloud-to-ground stepped leader process happening toward the end of the clip.

The fifth video is showing a branchless (non-stepped) positive leader and flash (the loud sonic-booming type). Raindrops are visible slowly falling through the frame!
 
Dan Robinson said:
The fourth video is the most intriguing of all of them, apparently an 'anvil-crawler' like discharge with a CG connection.
Click to expand...

That video explains a mystery to me, rarely I had a crawler like (spider) strike go off above me that had a sound like loud and sharp static or those sparkly fireworks going off before during or after the main thunder........ They seem to happen closer to the ground than the anvils. If looking up they looked different but couldn't explain how.
 
Can't say with 100% accuracy, but they definitely look like some of the videos that Tim Samaras has gathered over the past couple of years. Per Jim's link to the visionresearch site, he is using one of their Phantom series cameras at rates of 15,000 frames per second to gather those images.
 
According to my friend Darren up at South Dakota School of Mines:
The first three links (youtube links) on the first post from Dan Robinson are from Tom Warner (an SDSMT grad) in Rapid City, SD. He runs a project called ZT Research (ztresearch.com) and has been collecting high speed video of lightning for research. He has been collaborating with Vlad Mazur for a few years now.
Click to expand...
 
That first video is pretty neat in that you can really see it almost hunting and feeling it's way for the tallest object. Once that streamer makes contact with the ground... BOOM.
 
Definitely on par with what Tim Samaras has shared at NCC the last couple of years. He has several series similar to the 4th video with all the "nano leaders" (my term, not the technical term). Just awesome. I can't believe these were shared on youtube. Hopefully he'll get his 500k to 1M fps cam up and functioning within the next few seasons.
 
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