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Wired magazine: issue 17.06

In the Strike Zone: What Lightning Teaches Us

By Sarah Douglas Email 05.235.09 | 6:00 PM

Lightning comes in more flavors than you can shake a metal rod
at--positively or negatively charged, headed up or down, hitting the
ground or another cloud. Atmospheric scientists know that ice
particles in a thundercloud become slightly charged. Eventually, a
negatively charged layer of the storm gets sandwiched between two
positives. Electricity arcs among the layers, ionizing the air and
making it glow. But experts have yet to understand the bolts'
behavior. Researchers are now tracking the radio waves and x-rays
produced by lightning, and they're even experimenting with synthetic
strikes (made with rockets!). Here's their current thinking.

11 Types of Bolts

1. Gigantic jet
About 80 percent of all storm discharges are intracloud. But if one
heads up and hits a weak positive charge in the upper layer, it exits
skyward.

2. Bolt from the blue
Gigantic jets can exit the cloud sideways and touch down miles away
from the storm that spawned them under a clear blue sky.

3. Spider
These discharges travel up to 60 miles per second over huge distances,
moving laterally through horizontal layers.

4. Beaded
Certain segments of the kinked ion channel seem to glow brighter when
seen from a particular angle.

5. Forked
When too much negative charge builds up at the end of a bolt, its
channel can split apart in midair to form two or more offshoots.

6. Ribbon
Multiple strikes sometimes share the same channel. If the wind blows
the channel sideways, the eye perceives a band of light in the
microseconds between strokes.

7. Zigzag
As a storm dissipates, air between the cloud and the ground holds
pockets of charge. This produces bolts that hop groundward from one
pocket to the next.

8. Ball
Grapefruit-sized, glowing spheres of electricity have been reported in
the vicinity of thunderstorms. No one knows why.

9. Energetic narrow bipolar
These intracloud flashes are one of the strongest natural source of
radio emissions. They last only 10 microseconds.

10. Red sprite
Positively charged cloud-to-ground lightning makes the cloud more
negative. That negative field reaches upward above the cloud, where
lower air densities mean less energy to produce a discharge--which
then glows red.

11. Blue jet
According to one theory, negatively charged cloud-to-ground lightning
makes the cloud more positive; the storm pumps the excess positivity
skyward in a high-energy burst that makes the ionized air around it
glow blue.

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