Smooth Channel lightning - any science ?

This is an interesting topic Michael, I hope this can help with the camera processing debate.I have this photo taken form Coffs Harbour in Australia on September 18 2012, It's interesting that only a portion of the bolt is smooth channel in appearance..



 
Thought I'd refresh this topic whilst having a look for some explanation to this bizarre phenomenon. I had never witnessed smooth channel lightning ( all my chasing has been done in Australia till this point) until the 25th May 2012 near Russell, KS. Visually to the eye the bolts had a stacatto like quickness to them but with no apparent branching, and it wasn't just a few random bolts here and there...I managed to get a least 30 smooth channel bolts in an hour or so. I've heard anecdotal reports of the incidence of smooth channel lightning is most prevalent with tornadic supercells ( which the Russell cell turned out to be)...is there any research out there on this? I'll post two pics of examples we saw...the first pic was taken on the last breath of dusk. The second pic is unusual in the fact that the bolts start branched at the top but transitions two of the bolts into a smooth channel appearance whilst the centre bolt retains more of a "classic" type appearance. I wonder have the bolts encountered a different or stronger area of polarity closer to the surface perhaps? Either way it was an unusual spectacle to witness!





Cheers Jason
 
It would make sense to me that the gun shot boom with no rumble sound you hear after some of these bolts are coming from short intense bolts with little branching. What makes thunder sound the way it does is how far from the person's ear each segment of the bolt and branches are. In other words if you had a single short bolt where the majority of the bolt was running cross ways or up and down in relation to the person it would sound like a single blast. however if you have a long bolt that runs away from or towards a person then there will be a lot more of a rumble sound. And then if there is branching that adds to the total effect in different ways depending on how all the branching is oriented. A lightning flash is almost instant, but a mile long bolt running away from someone will have about five seconds of sound. We try to put this or that bolt into certain categories when every bolt is a little different. I'm not sure these bolts I've seen would be considered positive bolts though because they were under the base. I mainly just photograph the stuff and haven't studied it much for myself, but always assumed positive cg bolts connected the upper regions of a storm with the surrounding land area. Also it seems to me the anvil type upward lightning with upward branching is something different than what we are talking about here.

Jason P, these images you shared are probably from the same Michael Bath photographed. He posted some lightning shots here
http://www.stormtrack.org/forum/showthread.php?24353-Your-Best-Lightning-Shot-to-date/page32

It was on the same day anyway, He said near La Crosse, you said near Russell.
 
Ah, so ya'll were together. One other thing I wanted to mention about this topic in general is that bolts that are smooth channel close to the ground it seems are more common than the ones like the OP shared. And the smooth channel appearance has nothing to do with the camera or time of day.
 
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