Abstract
We have seen that BL observations exhibit a clear correlation between thunderstorms, lightning, and BL, so we need to take a closer look at how lightning works in order to be able to understand BL. Since lightning research is a very broad and active field of research, we will have to restrict the discussion to the areas which are most likely to be relevant to BL. For a more detailed discussion of the many aspects of lightning physics, there is an excellent review of the current state of the art (Dwyer and Uman, 2014), and the books by Cooray (2015) and the “lightning bible” of Rakov and Uman (2003) cover all the scientific aspects of lightning and lightning protection.
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Notes
- 1.
You can find a number of such videos on, e.g., YouTube, by searching for ultra-slow-motion lightning.
- 2.
The image is one frame from: https://youtu.be/vbQtqsolWjs. See also (Saba et al., 2017).
- 3.
Search, for example, for Martin Popek.
- 4.
- 5.
Details of this charging process are still unclear.
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Boerner, H. (2019). Thunderstorms and Lightning. In: Ball Lightning. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20783-0_7
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