High Speed Lightning Cameras

Dr. Phil Krider at the University of Arizona (from whom I took classes in the 80's) makes a lightning-like appearance in this story:

New high-speed video cameras are helping reveal the structure of lightning, allowing scientists to study these deadly bolts of electricity in much greater detail than ever before.

The cameras are showing images of lightning that have otherwise been invisible to the naked eye and have never been captured on traditional film or video cameras.

"The high-speed video recording systems are providing an entirely new dimension in our understanding of lightning — namely, time, with enough resolution to see entirely new processes in the spatial development of intracloud and cloud-to-ground flashes," says E. Philip Krider, an atmospheric scientist and lightning expert at the University of Arizona, in an e-mail.

...These images are not only invisible to the human eye, but they can't be captured by conventional video cameras, which produce just 30 to 60 images a second. High-speed video cameras can capture several thousand images a second.

Warner says Vlad Mazur, a scientist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., was the first to study storms using a 1,000-image-per-second camera in the early 1990s. Warner adds that it has been only in the past three or four years that technology has enabled him and other scientists to use high-speed video to study lightning, when "the speed and therefore the resolution increased significantly to allow for meaningful resolutions to be captured at speeds above 5,000 images per second."

Lightning is, well, "lightning fast." According to the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., a lightning bolt's downward leader (the initial discharge) speeds toward its target at 136,000 mph, while the luminous return stroke into the clouds moves at 62 million mph. These strokes are so fast that the human eye sees just a single flickering lightning bolt.

The high-speed cameras can show the previously unseen structure of the first part of lightning bolts, the forked "stepped leaders" that move toward the ground in a series of jumps and then spark the more visible return stroke. All of this occurs in less than half a second.