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While driving home from a family vacation during a thunderstorm near St. Petersburg, Florida on Friday, Michael May Whalen decided to try his hand at catching lightning. After a number of failed photo attempts, she switched to video and struck lightning gold.
A pickup truck in front of her — driven by her husband, with her children aboard — was struck hard by the cloud-to-ground lightning. He and the children were fine, although the truck was reported to be “totally fried.”
Meteorologists called the video capture the “craziest” and “most incredible” close-up lightning video ever.
The lightning may have consisted of a series of four strokes or rapid electrical discharges from the cloud and ground, lightning scientist Chris Vagasky tweeted. The first sign of its appearance was a blinding light that caused the camera to overexpose the scene. The barrage first hit the right rear of her husband’s pickup truck, roughly several car lengths in front of the camera.
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A moment later, Whalen can be heard reacting with a scream, followed by an important question: “Is he okay?”
Her husband and children were unharmed because the steel-framed vehicle acts as a “Faraday cage” in which the lightning current travels around the metal body and usually exits to the ground through the tires. The strike will avoid people as long as everyone is inside the vehicle and not touching the outside metal. This is also the reason why planes are often struck by lightning without much damage.
Simultaneously with the first flash, a bright orange sheath surrounds where it connects to the truck as sparks shoot out in all directions.
In less than a moment, two more rapid flashes are seen, as well as smoke rising from the impact site. Vagaski believes the smoke was caused by the first impact.
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“When lightning strikes, it sends thousands of amperes of current and extreme heat into an object in just microseconds, causing an explosive expansion,” Vagasky said in a release.
The final flash—announced by an explosion tearing through the air—occurs as the viewer’s vehicle rushes forward in the path of the flash. Another burst of sparks is seen, along with an additional orange flame.
While the flash looks relatively straight even from a short distance, the video shows a strike with very small zigzags and loops – a plasma channel. Eventually, the channel bursts into pieces.
Plasma is the result of lightning formed when air molecules split into their atoms. At this point, the plasma can be as hot as 50,000 degrees, or about five times hotter than the sun.
“The flash channel is more of a plasma, and that’s what we see right in front of the camera at the end of the video,” Vagasky said.
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