First Spectrum of Ball Lightning.

[pottyprof]

I've seen this reported on a couple of sites recently and I thought you guys might be interested in it.

Ball lightning has been one of the most mysterious natural phenomena for centuries, partly because it is so rare and transient and therefore hard to investigate. But a fortuitous observation during field experiments in China to study ordinary lightning, reported in Physical Review Letters, has now provided what seems to be the first measurement of the emission spectrum of ball lightning. The data suggest that the glowing ball was composed of elements from soil, consistent with one popular theory.

http://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/5

[ZONE 51]

Very interesting. Such a subject as this is very much something I have been interested in since childhood. As someone that has been in the close vicinity of such phenomenon (near to other people seeing the BL at the time) I would like answers to how they form. It seems that the 1980s had quite an occurrence of these ball lightnings especially around my home county of Surrey, many reports back then but not at all now, even with the Internet age not heard of any ball lightning locally not really anywhere else either(UK)

My thinking of a possible reason is the type of thunderstorms that occurred back then, day-time went almost dark, and my theory is cloud height, if the storm cloud does not reach such a height on a hot summers day (for example) then it would not go to dark, another theory being lightning type. I don't know just a thought.

Edited January 19, 2014 by ElectricSnowStorm