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Tom Warner documents the powerful beauty of lightning with an array of optical and electromagnetic sensors. He often uses a Vision Research ‘Phantom’ high-speed camera.

Warner is a Ph.D student at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, in Rapid City. He studies atmospheric sciences with a specialty in lightning research. “Lightning is one of nature’s most spectacular phenomena,” says Warner. “I want to understand how lightning behaves.”

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“Since 2007, I have used high-speed video cameras capable of recording lightning at up to 54,000 images per second. These cameras enable us to see lightning like never before, as we can clearly see lightning propagate downward from the clouds or upward from tall objects.

The camera continuously records in a looping memory buffer. “When I see a flash take place, I trigger the camera at the end of the flash and it saves the previous 2.5 seconds of video prior to the trigger.”

He then saves the video into the camera’s memory. It is then transferred to a computer hard drive to analyze later.

Warner explains what’s in each of these six videos, and how he made them.

Above:

Near Devil’s Tower, Wyoming

The video shows a downward-propagating negatively charged, stepped leader. The lightning branches out in many different directions, causing one leader to make a connection with the ground, creating a bright return stroke.

The lightning was filmed at 7,200 images per second (139 microseconds per image). The downward leaders are traveling at a couple of hundred kilometers per second. The bright return stroke travels upward at around half the speed of light, and is too fast to capture in more than one image.