#lightning #slowed #slowmotion
This was the second round of heavy storms for the Huntsville area. The first round moved through during the previous evening and unfortunately produced multiple damaging tornadoes including a confirmed EF-1 in the heart of Huntsville. Training thunderstorms also produced flooding. The second round moved through between 4AM and 9AM, and while less severe, this line did exacerbate the flooding issues.
It took a while for the lightning show to get going, but it did deliver a mix of upwards from the WAFF tower (surprisingly, only the WAFF tower), a close negative CG, and high peak-current stratiform positives (plus one negative). When return strokes occurred on the upward flashes, they were modest 10-25kA strokes so I didn't annotate them in the video. I'll probably post them here in the future since researchers are interested in detection efficiency of upward lightning (since they tend to elude existing remote sensing techniques while being inherently damaging to structures).
EQUIPMENT I USE:
Nikon D5300 DSLR
Sony CyberShot RX100V
YI 4K Action Camera
Model YAS. 1616.INT
Samsung Galaxy S9 Smartphone
Sony Stereo Digital Voice Recorder
Model ICD-UX570
Video editing done using Shotcut
Lightning information provided by Vaisala's National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN) through weather.us/lightning. Note that I only use this information to roughly estimate stroke intensity and distance, the data may be prone to error on my end and my work is not, and should not be considered to be, a formal evaluation of the NLDN's performance.
Thanks to Tom A. Warner and other lightning physicists and researchers who have helped me understand lightning processes explained in my videos. Tom has created a great resource for individuals interested in learning how lightning works.
ztresearch.blog/education/