You may have seen this viral video of a lightning strike earlier this month. With over 14,000 retweets and counting, it’s pretty safe to say it has gone viral.
And for good reason. Take a look:
This is one of the craziest lightning strikes you’ll ever see.
— Kansas City Media (@KansasCityMedia)
There’s clearly … a lot going on here. First of all, the video taker and location aren’t posted in the video, but it does appear legitimate based on the science of lightning, as we’ll explain. It’s also taken by a high-speed camera that’s able to capture the full formation process of a lightning stroke.
It could happen in Colorado; it’s part of the state’s overall vulnerability to lightning impacts on humans.
Let’s step back and start off with the basics of lightning. Mother Nature is generally trying to even things out, and weather plays a big part in that. When a storm develops, there are charge (positive and negative) differences between different parts of a cloud, and sometimes between the cloud and the ground. When the charge difference becomes big enough — the base of the cloud and the ground usually carry positive charges, while the middle of a storm cloud will hold a negative one — the negative charge begins to move downward. If the positive charge at the base of the cloud isn’t enough to satisfy the accumulated and greater negative charges in the middle and upper portions of a storm cloud, the negative charge will then begin to move toward the positively charged ground.
Think of it this way: If you’re on fire and a bucket of water isn’t enough to put it out, then you’ll sprint to the pool instead. In that analogy, you’re the negative charge, the bucket of water is the base of the cloud, and the pool is the ground.
As the negative charge moves away from the base of the cloud and toward the ground, though, it’s not usually in a straight line. In the video, you can see the jagged, sparkler-like motion to the lightning stroke. Those first lines in the lightning bolt as it races out of the base of the cloud — known as stepped leaders — are trying to offset the positive/negative charge differential.
Lightning strokes, however, can only sense the charge differential up to around 50 meters away from the tip of the stepped leader. The stepped leader will surge (at about 200,000 MPH, no less) from one pocket of air to another, based on the charge differential.
So try and think of a stepped leader like a blindfolded kid trying to smack a moving pinata: The kid can only sense the swaying pinata as far as the end of his bat allows him to, and it’s probably not going to be a smooth process.
“In this video, there appears to be an initial downward stepped leader that comes out of the cloud, and then more downward leaders branch off from the main channel, seeking the path of least resistance to the ground,” said Chris Vagasky, a Colorado-based meteorologist who studies lightning.
So what about big, bright linear flash at the end of the video? That, according to Vagasky, is the moment a downward streamer makes contact with an upward streamer, completing the task the lightning bolt set out to do in the first place: create a full electrical discharge.
“Once one of the downward leaders makes contact with an upward streamer, you see the bright flash as full electrical discharge occurs,” Vagasky said. “In this video, you see a single complete lightning stroke, but it ends right after, so it’s hard to say if there were multiple strokes in the lightning flash.”
Of course, with the right equipment to document such a lightning stroke, a similar event could easily take place in Colorado. In an average year, about 500,000 lightning strikes hit Colorado, . With that much lightning, anything is possible — including a spectacular light show like the one in this video.
