Rare rising lightning spotted in Kansas

One of the residents of the city of Wichita in the US state of Kansas captured on video a rare rising lightning. The footage was obtained on the evening of March 29, when thunderstorms were raging in the region. Like an electric tree growing before our eyes, lightning branches stretch upwards in the distance over residential buildings.

The shooting was conducted in slow motion, which allows us to consider the movement of the discharge in more detail.

The formation of "inverted" lightning is possible in the presence of towers or other hills on the terrain, the electric field on the tops of which increases during a thunderstorm. With this type of lightning, its channel, called the leader, does not begin with a thundercloud, but with a grounded object with a height of at least 100 meters.

For example, the Ostankino TV tower experiences about thirty lightning strikes a year, and almost all of them are ascending. Thus, high-rise structures themselves are more often initiators of electrical discharges of the ascending type than they are affected by descending ones. And planes can initiate bidirectional lightning when the leader spreads upwards towards the cloud and down towards the ground.