Ball lightning in Wyoming

Attention: Mattfax: I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a large cold front sweep through the plains, but it’s pretty awe inspiring. In 1993, somewhere around the Wyoming state line, my wife and I drove straight into one. During the hellacious lightning storm, there was a stroke of lightning that floated in a spherical shape about 30 feet off the ground. It appeared to have a bolt out of the top and connected to the ground. It seemed to last about three to five seconds. Anyone that I have described this to has no idea what I’m talking about. Any clue? — Doug Weston, Scripps Ranch

A question near to my weird heart. Matt Al’s favorite color is folding green, favorite food is anything but bananas, and favorite meteorological phenomenon is the thunderstorm. Not the wimpy San Diego variety. I mean the big, hairy kind Doug’s described. It’s like putting on a tin foil hat and hopping into a microwave.

We stirred up considerable head-scratching at the University of Oklahoma’s Severe Storm Lab, the wettest and most windblown researchers in all of academia. They chase storm fronts and tornadoes for a living. If Doug’s mystery sphere had been freely floating, without the stroke coming from the top, they’d say it was a rare sighting of ball lightning, a glowing ball of electrical energy or perhaps gasses (nobody’s sure how it’s created). If there had been more than one sphere, the storm experts would say it was bead lightning, also unusual. This is created by hot spots within the bolt that continue to glow as the rest of the bolt fades. It gives the appearance of a string of beads.

Ball lightning persists a little longer than bead lightning, but not three to five seconds. The average lightning flash lasts less than a second. Considering that lightning strikes Earth about 100 times a second, we don’t know a lot about it. One thing we can say for sure is the earsplitting thunder crash heard along with the mystery bolt was the result of pressure waves caused by the rapidly expanding lightning bolt channel. The pressure waves degrade into sound waves that we hear as thunder. Terrifying. Invigorating. A treat for the senses.