Strange Lightning
Taken by Peter Lowenstein on November 21, 2015 @
Mutare, Zimbabwe
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Details:
Following an intense heatwave and prolonged drought, a band of moist tropical air originating from Angola and the DRC has brought some welcome rain to many parts of Zimbabwe. It's arrival in Mutare was accompanied by much thunder and a variety of different lightning bolts. The first during the heat of the day were often single unbranched (positive?) ground strikes associated with downpours from cumulus clouds and some were accompanied by loud reports. Later in the evening spectacular relatively quiet displays of Anvil Crawlers could be seen running from cloud to cloud. One particularly strange lightning discharge (shown in the accompanying images) occurred at about 20.00 hrs LT in clouds in the vicinity of a TV transmitter mast on top of a range of hills which overlook Murambi Suburb. The still frames, captured from a video taken of the approaching storm, show that the lightning bolt initially propagated relatively slowly from the right and then accelerated to trace out a graceful parabolic arc which then branched and terminated high up in the clouds. What is strange is the very bright orb of light that developed near the beginning of it's path and persisted in intensity even after much of the rest of the channel had faded. It is not certain if this is a manifestation of ball or beaded lightning or was just due (as is often suspected) to sharp kinking or deflection/doubling back of the lightning path? The faint afterglow of the bright spot is still faintly visible just before the end of the slow motion GIF and in the eleventh frame of the image mosaic. No visible portion of the lightning appears to have struck anything on the ground. It would therefore be very much appreciated if other Spaceweather readers could offer comment and advise if they have seen anything like it before. The material presented has all been extracted from an MTS format video taken at 25 frames per second using a tripod-mounted Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ10 compact camera. The two animated GIF's, which have frame intervals of 80 and 800 milliseconds, portray what happened at one-half and one-twentieth real-time speed respectively.
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