High-speed video captures the nuts and bolts of lightning

— -- New high-speed video cameras are helping reveal the structure of lightning, allowing scientists to study these deadly bolts of electricity in much greater detail than ever before.

The cameras are showing images of lightning that have otherwise been invisible to the naked eye and have never been captured on traditional film or video cameras.

Just as photography first revealed how horses' legs actually function while at a full gallop, so too does this new technology allow us to see how lightning strikes actually work.

"The high-speed video recording systems are providing an entirely new dimension in our understanding of lightning — namely, time, with enough resolution to see entirely new processes in the spatial development of intracloud and cloud-to-ground flashes," says E. Philip Krider, an atmospheric scientist and lightning expert at the University of Arizona, in an e-mail.

Says Tom Warner, a meteorologist with ZT Research in South Dakota, who studies high-speed videos of lightning: "There are components of lightning that we could not see optically before. The beautiful thing about high-speed cameras is that they show us the lightning progression image by image, which is what the human mind is used to seeing, and therefore make it much easier to visualize and understand."

These images are not only invisible to the human eye, but they can't be captured by conventional video cameras, which produce just 30 to 60 images a second. High-speed video cameras can capture several thousand images a second.

Warner says Vlad Mazur, a scientist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., was the first to study storms using a 1,000-image-per-second camera in the early 1990s. Warner adds that it has been only in the past three or four years that technology has enabled him and other scientists to use high-speed video to study lightning, when "the speed and therefore the resolution increased significantly to allow for meaningful resolutions to be captured at speeds above 5,000 images per second."