Scott Manley - 2020-08-17
We had some storms in the Bay Area over the weekend and I captured a slow motion video of a lightning strike, which I'm told is a rare case of lightning starting from the ground and travelling upwards to the clouds. This was recorded on a Sony RX100 Mk VII at 960FPS, ISO 80,000 https://amzn.to/2QdUH0F
Thank you Scott. On behalf of my fellow meteorologists, we thank you for the treat. Personally, I'm glad you caught this and shared it. I'll be referring my colleagues to this one. Much appreciated!
Do you ever confer with some of the excellent meteorologists in Oklahoma?
@Keny Charles Quite often, yes. Mostly SPC and NOAA folks, but I also have a lot of friends in media all over the state. I am in Denver.
Last saturday we had an incredible lightning storm here in northern Virginia and I was one of many people to report some explosive strikes. It came overnight and I was awoken by a strike that shook my entire apartment and set off every car alarm in my neighborhood. I've experienced plenty of close strikes including trees being hit in my backyard but this was very different. Once that first strike hit my heart was beating through my chest and I couldn't sleep for the rest of the night. Even my nearly deaf dog was visibly shaken.
That was amazing to watch. I live in the southeast where storms like this can be an every evening occurence and have always been fascinated by taking (still) pictures of lightning. Back in the days of film cameras, I would burn the batteries so fast that I ended up buying a completely manual camera just for that purpose. I love finding nights like this and getting myself into a position where I can be beside the storm to try to capture the bolts that come from the top, outside the cloud, and have been very lucky quite a few times to get some pretty amazing shots. Thanks for sharing the slow motion shot as it was just amazing!
Beautiful video Scott! I, too, am fascinated by how lightning works as well as why it is. From how it affects local weather to its rarity in some places on earth as opposed to other areas where it is far more likely to occur, lightning is a scientific enigma with far, far more questions than answers; which makes it a perfect match for humankind's pioneering spirit and need to know why things are.
Wow, this may be a VERY rare video. I'm wondering if you've been contacted by meteorologists that specialize in lightning, because this is really incredible. How it's seeking out energy and the fact that you captured it and with a camera that could do it slow enough to see every moment of it's evolution is truly amazing. Great job Scott!!
I have never seen anything like this, it is just amazing and fun to learn science with you, Scott! Thank you!
I've lived in the Bay Area for (next month) 33 years. While fairly small lightning storms used to be more or less annual, usually one or two during the fall season back when we actually had a fall season, they've been far rarer since about 2006. And even still, I've never seen anything like what we got in my entire life.
A few years ago, I was staying on the island of Corfu, when during the evening a series of thunderstorms developed over Albania and headed towards us. I’d never seen anything quite like it, for more than an hour, the surroundings were lit up almost constantly by the lightning. I was monitoring it on a lightning information website; they were detecting 200+ strikes a minute! It was ethereal and like one of those cheesy horror films with the constant flickering. I wish I’d had a camera like yours to capture some of it! Great footage!👍🏼
Beautiful photography Scott, and a great explanation that follows. Another amazing gift you’ve given to all of us.
This has been a very interesting few weeks here in the bay. The fires sparked are the worst part but the storms themselves have been great to watch. Thank you for capturing this video
I used to live in SF and lightning is very rare since most storms are strataform from the Gulf of Alaska. Now I'm in NYC and almost all summer storms are thunderstorms. It's sooo cool to step outside and watch the lightning (from the street there's low risk as there are much taller buildings in the area for the lightning to find an easier path to ground).
My god! I used to take time exposure lighting pictures with my 35 mm Nikon this is a whole other level! Absolutely amazing! Thank you for sharing! From the ground up demonstrated beautifully Nikolai Tesla would be impressed ! 😎👍
I saw it on Suspicious0bservers too. My mother loved chasing storms and using her old, huge, VHS camera on her shoulder to record lightning. One time it caught up with her. It sent her sailing for 20 feet, the camera kept recording and she was featured on Leeza Gibbons' show. (early 90's) I am very happy to see that you have the same passion as my mother. Good luck in all your photography endeavors. This was a beautiful capture!
Thanks for the great video Scott. If you are in Colorado along the front range during Spring, thunderstorms are almost a daily occurrence.
Great footage Scott. You once again taught me something, I thought all lightning went from ground to cloud and then main strike goes back to ground.
For the those who doubt Scott’s statement that such storms are rare in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve been here over 53 years and can’t remember one like This one ever in that time period. We’ve had some lightning, but not like this. It woke me at about 02:30 and was still going at 06:30 the next morning. Then we had more off and on for several hours here in the mid South Bay (Newark-Fremont). On a Delta flight out of Dulles, we flew just east of a line of thunder storms along the eastern seaboard. There was cloud-cloud lighting for a couple of hours that lit up the entire left side of the plane. That was quite a show from 35,000ft
Great capture! I only wish you had been able to show it in real-time so we could see how fast it was.
Congrats Scott! That's an incredible piece of footage.
I live in Minneapolis, MN and, even though there are buildings and light pollution, we still get plenty of very visible thunderstorms. I absolutely love watching the lightning during a storm!
The SlowMo Guys made an extremely awesome slow-motion video (duh) of some lightning, I'm sure everyone's seen it but if you haven't... you might be able to learn from it. Also great footage! I too always like to photograph/film lightning whenever there's a storm, it's just awesome there's no two ways about it. Sadly my phone camera isn't slow-mo capable as my phone is an ancient relic from like 300 B.C but still :P
Nerding out .. Yep that's me! 😂 Always amazed by the things you bring to the world Scott. Fly safe!
I live in San Leandro, near Oakland and Hayward, I saw a ton of lightning and heard the rain... About 1/3-3/4 into the lightning , the sky went from near pitch black to dim blue on the top and oranges, pinks, and reds near the horizon. I'm not usually watching the sky at dawn, but that was all very interesting to see. Did you happen to see any of that, Scott?
During thunderstorms I always like to pull out my AM radio to listen to the lightning.
During this storm I could hear so many different types of strikes. Short pops of varying volume from the single bolts, sometimes a crackle when a swarm of bolts went off, then the most interesting was sometimes a longer creaking/crackling noise that would happen during long, large strikes, presumable caused by the leader slowly snaking around, constantly moving the charge that my radio was picking up as EM.
I witnessed this event from my front porch in Fremont. Looking towards the south the display i saw from 5:20an too 6:15am Sunday morning was one of the most spectacular lighting events i have ever seen.
One of the best lightning bolt catches I've seen, great shot Scott!
Great slow Mo vid, gotta love nature's display of power and lighting is always great to watch. Thanks.
Fabulous footage! Thank you for sharing (from Montana, USA, we too, have had more lightening storms than ordinary.)
That's an insanely crisp recording. I have a few very nice photos (long exposure) of lightning but due to rolling shutter never got a good recording. This is beautiful.
I know how difficult and frustrating it can be to get a good shot of lightning, so well done on a great capture!
Amazing that you can see that much motion in 960fps, I thought it moved a lot faster than that!
This is amazing. Dr. Ben, at Suuspicious observers has talked about incidences of ground to sky lightning are increasing. There's been more of those recorded this year than in any previous.
Amazing catch.
Lightning ALWAYS grows from both endpoints at once. Tendrils of opposite-charge ions extend up from the ground and down from the clouds until they meet somewhere in the middle; this is why people often report they feel their hair standing on-end a few seconds before they get hit by lightning. The path the lightning appears to take is the result of whether the path branches more near the ground or near the clouds, because the end with fewer branching paths has to conduct more amperage and thus the ionized air gets excited to the point of phosphorescence faster.
@Sal Paradise I gotta say... your description sounds a bit like pseudo-science (not saying it is, just that that's how it's coming across, at least for me). I mean, sure, electromagnetic systems influence each other, to varying degrees... and the sun's electromagnetic situation can certainly influence things closer to earth (the auroras are a well-known example of this)... however, you seem to be talking about something... well, you're making claims that sound grand, without being very specific. Could you post some links to discussions of what you're referring to?
@Sal Paradise Yeah, and electromagnetic fields from Earth travel forever across the universe, getting weaker and weaker but never reaching zero, right? Except that isn't really how the universe works. That simplistic model ignores noise which limits every system in the universe. There's a limit beyond which a field no longer has any effect distinguishable from random noise. It ceases to be a factor. And that's why the hot air coming out of your mouth really doesn't have any impact on hurricane formation in the eastern Atlantic ocean. Nor does the Earth's moving magnetic pole suddenly change the nature of lightning.
@Star Gazer None of which speaks to the current phenomenon. You're just using the reductio ad absurdum tactic.
@Sal Paradise You would be the expert on absurdium tactics.
@Star Gazer Richard Cranium Award for you.
Hi Scott, on the spacex starlink launch that just occurred, I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts on the tumbling object in space well below the 2nd stage at around 18:12min after launch
Hey Scott. I did exactly the same thing trying to take a picture of lightning. I was using an SLR with high-speed ektachrome slide film. 55 millimeter lens set at F8 with the shutter open. On my parents house roof. I got it and it looked much like your video here. But in very crisp definition. Then I lost the slide. Bummer... That was in 1971
It's a lovely video, great trigger timing. My RX100 mk4 sadly isn't useable anymore as the rear screen basically died and couldn't be repaired. I loved the 1000fps feature but I didn't use it to shoot video anyways. My GX9 now doesn't any high fps feature due to a slow buffer.
The charged air particles massively expand and heat up. The cool really fast afterwards and basically cause this giant column of low desire air. It falls against itself and causes the thunder sound.
I love so much that Scott has transitioned from video game youtuber to science uncle
Scott I think you need to spend a week or so in Florida at some point during summer (probably for a launch!). As a native Floridian during most of the year it's very rare for me to go more than 12-36 hours without hearing thunder and seeing lightning. Here in Lakeland we've had a thunderstorm at 1pm every day for the last week and a half.
Awesome. Those who havent checked out Slow Mo Guys' video on lightning should do that as well! They're filming regular, down-going leaders though, so not AS interesting. But they film several of them at like 100 000 FPS in HD so it looks amazing.
We had one of the biggest storms in Edinburgh last week. Biggest I have seen in my life here in Scotland. Last for over 3 hrs and averaged about 3 strikes a second. Sadly for me what I could mostly see was just cloud to cloud stuff but still was incredible still.
whoa, you caught a gem there. i have seen what seemed to be cloud to cloud lightning a few times, too, and it seemed to be somehow slower and more legato than usual cloud to ground strikes. interesting stuff!
It is amazing to watch the electrons trace a momentary path of least resistance in a dynamically changing 3D volume of vorticity and vapor.
I guess the bright spots were coming from the bolt traveling horizontally towards (or away) from the camera.
When the angry pixies escape..
This is incredible! I slept through it! Love your explanation. Thank you for sharing.
I find it interesting that immediately after a lightning has struck, you can see the left over plasma fade out. I've also found it interesting that you can see where a bolt was, as it leaves the air burned where it was. (basically a small whiff of smoke)
Scott, you should talk about how the lighting happens and then the thunder rumbles and roars for about a minute. You could also take the video and calculate the sound delay. Then use a map and the camera angle to calculate exactly where that bolt is.
Strange timing. Had a large lightning storm in my part of Western Canada last night. Very rare.
Storm clouds aren't just positively and negatively charged as depicted in that illustration. I have seen storms where the exchange of electrons happens laterally, so that one end of the storm cloud is producing single huge yellow bolts of lightning while simultaneously, the other end of the storm is producing blue sheet lighting that rarely goes to ground.
The weather went from calm to severe thunderstorm so fast, it was pretty crazy for the bay area.
Actually, typical return strokes travel from ground to cloud. It's the step leader that crawls from the cloud to the ground, and step leaders are faint compared to return strokes. However, lightning flashes that originate from tall, metallic objects such as suspension bridges do have step leaders that originate from the ground and travel to the cloud.
It's always weird to me when somebody calls lightning rare. Where I live, in South Africa, lightning and thunderstorms are almost a daily occurance during summer. But I think it's because our climate is very dry. We have lots of static as well.
The Lightning Hunter - 2020-08-18
Lightning expert here.
This is what's called "Lightning-triggered Upward Lightning". It's a bit different from common cloud-to-ground lightning where a downward leader attaches to an upward leader very close to the ground.
The first thing you see is a brightening of the clouds. These are negative-polarity leaders discharging a positive charge layer inside the cloud. This discharging causes a sudden electric field change which induces an upward positive (not negative) leader from a tall structure over the horizon-- possibly the Golden Gate Bridge or a skyscraper or radio mast. This positive leader runs into a negative charge layer that's just below the clouds and meanders around, brightening as it finds pockets of more intense negative charge. Eventually the positive leaders start branching and this is when the fun begins. These branches are poorly ionized and there are fast bidirectional leaders that form around the tips of the decayed positive branches. They are called "recoil leaders" and these are the strobing channel segments that we see later on in the video.
The bright event that you discuss throughout the video is actually quite interesting. I've looked at the footage multiple times and it looks like the brightening originates from the first branch point and progresses through the main branch. This tells me that there was current cutoff in the main branch near the branch point which suddenly became bridged, allowing much higher current to flow back to the tower and increasing electric potential at the leader tips.
I record high-speed lightning video with the same model of camera (it's a Mark 5 instead of a 7, still records 960fps) and I upload the recordings to this channel so if anyone wants to see more high-speed lightning video then feel free to stop by!
--Chris K
ThatSlowTypingGuy - 2021-04-27
@The Lightning Hunter Okay, that's what I figured. I was more wondering if the reason for the reduction in resistance was because of the air becoming superheated. (Or if maybe it was just more of an aftereffect.)
I know matter in a plasma state isn't a true "superconductor" because there is still some resistance, but I've read it can be quite a bit more conductive than some alternatives.
John Ellison - 2021-10-15
@Tom Feng Hello. Do you have any video links about "Charge Induction" as you have mentioned. And not the videos that YT suggest that mostly relate to the triboelectric effect or charging a mobile phone. Cheers.
John Ellison - 2021-10-15
@Reino Göransson Yeah. It can get somewhat confusing when studying electricity on YT and the Internet when you not in the US or India.
DanTheRobinson - 2022-05-03
I install, maintain and repair lightning protection systems , and of course the job entails one to learn about all aspects of lightning, and this by far is best explanation I have read , very very good 👍
aWoman Freed - 2022-05-11
What does the millions of tons of aerosol aluminum sprayed in the sky do to these electrical fields? I never see lightning anymore.