This is a nice short video, showing lots of different slow-motion leaders.
Was googling for references to "dark lightning", after reading a post by Gennadiy Tarassenko (thanks!) and came across the 2013 page below. I think this might have been mentioned before, somewhere on the forum, but I can'f find it now.
Scientists detect dark lightning linked to visible lightning
The (open access) paper itself can be found at: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.…oi/full/10.1002/grl.50466
But this short video is quite a good explanation of the events, as detected.
What I do think is notable is that the start of the leader formation process appears not to be coincident with the gamma ray flash (that seems to come later in the leader sequence), but is coincident with an initial short pulse of VLF radio frequency noise.
Another interesting paper, from July 2022:
QuoteHow lightning initiates inside thunderclouds remains a major puzzle of atmospheric electricity. By monitoring optical emissions from thunderstorms, the Atmosphere‐Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) onboard the International Space Station is providing new clues about lightning initiation by detecting Blue LUminous Events (BLUEs), which are manifestations of electrical corona discharges that sometimes precedes lightning. Here we combine optical and radio observations from a thunderstorm near Malaysia to uncover a new type of event containing multiple optical and radio pulses. We find that the first optical pulse coincides with a strong radio signal in the form of a Narrow Bipolar Event (NBE) but subsequent optical pulses, delayed some milliseconds, have weaker radio signals, possibly because they emanate from a horizontally oriented electrical discharges which does not trigger full‐fledged lightning. Our results cast light on the differences between isolated and lightning‐initiating electrical discharges.
Alan Smith, Thanks,
There he refers to the works of Nikitin, with whom I have just exchanged opinions about the nature of ball lightning.
I answer - in this way the magnetic properties of free electrons are manifested - this is the etherodynamic characteristic of free electrons. In the everyday sense - they "stick to each other ...
