No injuries were reported after an intense night of stormy weather unfolded in central Alberta on Wednesday night, but once the storms passed, one couple was left with a strange video of something bright and shiny a few hundred metres from their home that they could not make sense of.
Global News showed the video to Frank Florian, senior manager of planetarium and space sciences at the TELUS World of Science in Edmonton.
He described it as “an incredible video” of something “very strange associated with severe weather conditions.”
Florian said the events are believed to unfold when there is plasma — a superheated gas — confined to a small area.
“Lightning itself is a plasma,” he said. “You have an electrical path going through the sky from the cloud to the Earth, kind of meet up in the middle and it superheats the air really, really quickly, and it creates a plasma
I know some of it is the intensity of the light, but that ball still looks huge.
This is really incredible footage of what could conclusively be ball lightning. Phenomenon that has very few pictures and even less video evidence.
Funny how none of these people have any idea how this works.
Lightnings are electrical arcs (i.e. channels of ionized air for electrons to go through) that are caused by very high voltages between clouds and the earth, which are generated by triboelectric effect (particles rubbing against each other, exchanging electrons, and gaining electrical potential), because of convection currents between hot and cold regions of the atmosphere… Which in turn creates electric field around the ground and the clouds, thus ionizing the air around them. That makes it conductive, and, finally, the spark jumps across the ionized portion of the air and makes a lightning. But neither of those points can keep supplying electrons to keep the arc going, so it ceases quickly. That’s the one reason why this cannot be a lightning of any kind (hence, ball lightnings don’t exist).
Also, as I mentioned earlier, the arc has to jump across two points of high potential, it can’t just arc in the middle!
So, what is happening there? Well, I don’t know for sure, but here is my theory: it’s actually just two high-voltage power lines arcing. And the “ball” is so far away, that it is almost on the horizon, which makes it look like it is nearly on the ground.
