Lightning kills man beneath cloudless sky

[Owlscrying]

June 22

A landscaper died after being struck by an unusual type of lightning that's stronger, hotter, lasts longer and strikes from clear skies.

With no rain or even clouds to warn him of the danger, death came literally out of the blue Thursday to a self-employed landscaper. The killer was a powerful bolt of lightning that cracked through perfectly clear skies.

D. Canales, 41, was on the job when the bolt hit. It first seared a tree, then traveled and struck Canales, standing nearby.

Experts said he was killed by a weather phenomenon fittingly called a ''bolt from the blue'' or ''dry lightning'' because it falls from clear, blue skies.

He is the latest victim of one of Florida's least enviable honors: It's the country's lightning capital. Five of the 47 people killed by lightning across the country last year were in Florida.

Dan Dixon, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Miami, said that when Canales was hit, a typical afternoon storm was forming but nowhere near the area.

''Most lightning will come from the base of a thunderstorm, inside that rain-shaft area, but occasionally, what we call a bolt from the blue comes out of a thunderstorm still several miles away'" he said.

Most lightning bolts carry a negative charge, but ''bolts from the blue'' have a positive charge, carry as much as 10 times the current, are hotter and last longer.

The bolts normally travel horizontally away from the storm and reach farther than typical lightning, then curve to the ground. This bolt struck the front yard of a home.

'They are very unpredictable and very dangerous.`If you're close enough to hear thunder, you're close enough to be struck by lightning.''

go

[SilverCougar]

Ya know.. sometimes it's just your time to die.. and the Fates, gods, God, or whoever just feels to give you a flashy send off.

[mypaddedroom]

Ya know.. sometimes it's just your time to die.. and the Fates, gods, God, or whoever just feels to give you a flashy send off.

Agreed 100% sad the way we have to go sometimes, but all happens for a reason.

[The Lone Wolf]

dang when i read the first paragraph i knew this was going to be a cool thread very very very interesting indeed

[The Lone Wolf]

this was in florida? glad i dont live there any more lol

[robbieb]

i think god doesnt like florida he attacks it with the craziest weather ever

[Mithra]

What wrong have he done in his life to be killed that way?

[Teej]

I guess technically (bearing in mind I have little knowledge of meteorology) a discharge of electricity could come at any moment. I've never heard of this before, but I suppose we associate lightning with clouds and rain because those are the circumstances in which it occurs the most. But it's by no means limited exclusively to those conditions.

Although I guess that's not really correct either, as the article mentions that this bolt still came from a thunderstorm. Meh

[Picturesque Orion]

Ya know.. sometimes it's just your time to die.. and the Fates, gods, God, or whoever just feels to give you a flashy send off.

So you are saying that God swingged his finger and sent a lighting to struck this person??! That is crazy. I have heard of this before but I still dont quite understand it. I have also heard of lightnings that instead of going down to the ground they go up, above the thunder cloud, and I dont know why that happens either........ hmmmm.

[The Three Ventriloquists]

So you are saying that God swingged his finger and sent a lighting to struck this person??! That is crazy. I have heard of this before but I still dont quite understand it. I have also heard of lightnings that instead of going down to the ground they go up, above the thunder cloud, and I dont know why that happens either........ hmmmm.

Lightning doesn't go up or down it meets in the middle.

[SilverCougar]

So you are saying that God swingged his finger and sent a lighting to struck this person??! That is crazy. I have heard of this before but I still dont quite understand it. I have also heard of lightnings that instead of going down to the ground they go up, above the thunder cloud, and I dont know why that happens either........ hmmmm.

It's just a saying for when crazy weird deaths happen ;P

I don't even believe in "god" which is why I added Fates.. gods.. and whatever..

>.>

[Picturesque Orion]

Lightning doesn't go up or down it meets in the middle.

Erm... lightning is produced due to static electricity building up on a cloud and with another cloud, this static electricity builds up so much that it becomes really charged and really hot. There can be lightning inside the charged cloud due to the discharges between it's positively charged part and its negatively charged parts. The bottom side of the cloud is negatively charged (-) and the surface is positevely charged (+), the lighting negatively charged from the bottom strikes the surface wich is pisitively charged.This is when people are at risk of being strucked. So what I meant of going down I meant that it contacts with the ground, floor surface ect, but there have been cases of lightning that instead of strucking the ground, floor, surface ect..... they struck up towards the sky, and that is a true anomaly.

Anyways, there are many types of lightning but it is just not normal for them to discharge above the cloud instead of at the bottom of the cloud ( surface of Earth) or in the cloud itself.

Here some info from wiki of the diferent kind of lightnings:

Types of lightning

Cloud-to-cloud lightning.Some lightning strikes take on particular characteristics; scientists and the public have given names to these various types of lightning. Most lightning is streak lightning. This is nothing more than the return stroke, the visible part of the lightning stroke. Because most of these strokes occur inside a cloud, we do not see many of the individual return strokes in a thunderstorm.

[edit] Cloud-to-cloud

Intracloud lightning is the most common type of lightning, and occurs completely inside one cumulonimbus cloud; it is termed sheet lightning because the bolt is not seen, instead one sees the whole cloud light up from inside.[15] Lightning that appears to travel extensively along the cloud anvil or its base is commonly called a crawler, or sometimes 'spider lightning'. Discharges of electricity in anvil crawlers travel up the sides of the cumulonimbus cloud branching out at the anvil top.

[edit] Rocket lightning

Rocket Lightning, Queanbeyan, Australia.It is a form of cloud discharge, generally horizontal and at cloud base, with a luminous channel appearing to advance through the air with visually resolvable speed, often intermittently. The movement resembles the movement of a rocket, hence its name. It is also one of the rarest of cloud discharges.

[edit] Cloud-to-ground

Cloud to ground lightning strikeCloud-to-ground lightning is a great lightning discharge between a cumulonimbus cloud and the ground initiated by the downward-moving leader stroke. This is the second most common type of lightning, and poses the greatest threat to life and property of all known types.

[edit] Bead lightning

A special type of cloud-to-ground lightning is bead lightning. This is a regular cloud-to-ground stroke that contains a higher intensity of luminosity. When the discharge fades it leaves behind a string of beads effect for a brief moment in the leader channel.

[edit] Ribbon lightning

Ribbon lightning occurs in thunderstorms with high cross winds and multiple return strokes. The winds will blow each successive return stroke slightly to one side of the previous return stroke, causing a ribbon effect.

[edit] Staccato lightning

Staccato lightning, which is nothing more than a leader stroke with only one return stroke.

[edit] Positive lightning

Positive lightning (also known as bolt from the blue or dry lightning)[16] makes up less than 5% of all lightning.[citation needed] It occurs when the leader forms at the positively charged cloud tops, with the consequence that a negatively charged streamer issues from the ground. The overall effect is a discharge of positive charges to the ground. Research carried out after the discovery of positive lightning in the 1970s showed that positive lightning bolts are typically six to ten times more powerful than negative bolts, last around ten times longer, and can strike tens of kilometres/miles from the clouds).[16] The voltage difference for positive lightning must be considerably higher, due to the tens of thousands of additional metres/feet the strike must travel. During a positive lightning strike, huge quantities of ELF and VLF radio waves are generated.[citation needed]

As a result of their greater power, positive lightning strikes are considerably more dangerous. At the present time, aircraft are not designed to withstand such strikes, since their existence was unknown at the time standards were set, and the dangers unappreciated until the destruction of a glider in 1999.[17] Positive lightning is also now believed to have been responsible for the 1963 in-flight explosion and subsequent crash of Pan Am Flight 214, a Boeing 707. Subsequently, aircraft operating in U.S. airspace have been required to have lightning discharge wicks to reduce the chances of a similar occurrence.

Positive lightning has also been shown to trigger the occurrence of upper atmosphere lightning. It tends to occur more frequently in winter storms and at the end of a thunderstorm.[citation needed]

An average bolt of positive lightning carries a current of up to 300 kA (kiloamperes) (about ten times as much current as a bolt of negative lightning), transfers a charge of up to 300 coulombs, has a potential difference up to 1 GV (gigavolts), and lasts for hundreds of milliseconds, with a discharge energy of up to 300 GJ (gigajoules).[citation needed]

Anvil to ground lightning strike

[edit] Anvil-to-ground

One special type of cloud-to-ground lightning is anvil-to-ground lightning. It is a form of positive lightning, since it emanates from the anvil top of a cumulonimbus cloud where the ice crystals are positively charged. The leader stroke issues forth in a nearly horizontal direction until it veers toward the ground. These usually occur miles ahead of the main storm and will strike without warning on a sunny day. They are signs of an approaching storm and are known colloquially as "bolts out of the blue".[citation needed]

[edit] Ground-to-cloud lightning

This is probably cloud-to-ground lightning, but it is difficult to distinguish from ground-to-cloud by visual inspection.Ground-to-cloud lightning is a lightning discharge between the ground and a cumulonimbus cloud from an upward-moving leader stroke.

[edit] Ball lightning

Main article: Ball lightning

Ball lightning is described as a floating, illuminated ball that occurs during thunderstorms. They can be fast moving, slow moving or nearly stationary. Some make hissing or crackling noises or no noise at all. Some have been known to pass through windows and even dissipate with a bang. Ball lightning has been described by eyewitnesses but rarely recorded by meteorologists.

The engineer Nikola Tesla wrote, "I have succeeded in determining the mode of their formation and producing them artificially".[18] There is some speculation that electrical breakdown and arcing of cotton and gutta-percha wire insulation used by Tesla may have been a contributing factor, since some theories of ball lightning require the involvement of carbonaceous materials. Some later experimenters have been able to briefly produce small luminous balls by igniting carbon-containing materials atop sparking Tesla Coils.

Several theories have been advanced to describe ball lightning, with none being universally accepted. Any complete theory of ball lightning must be able to describe the wide range of reported properties, such as those described in Singer's book "The Nature of Ball Lightning" and also more contemporary research. Japanese research shows that ball lightning has been seen several times without any connection to stormy weather or lightning.

Ball lightning is typically 20 – 30 cm (8-12 inches) in diameter, but ball lightning several meters in diameter has been reported.[19] Ball lightning has been seen in tornadoes, and has also been seen to split apart into two or more separate balls and recombine, and vertically-linked fireballs have been reported.[citation needed] Ball lightning has carved trenches in the peat swamps in Ireland.[citation needed] One theory that may account for this wider spectrum of observational evidence is the idea of combustion inside the low-velocity region of axisymmetric (spherical) vortex breakdown of a natural vortex (e.g., the 'Hill's spherical vortex').[20]

[edit] Upper-atmospheric

Reports by scientists of strange lightning phenomena above storms date back to at least 1886. However, it is only in recent years that fuller investigations have been made. This has sometimes been called megalightning.

[edit] Sprites

Main article: Sprites (lightning)

Sprites are now well-documented electrical discharges that occur high above some types of thunderstorms. They appear as luminous reddish-orange, plasma-like flashes, last longer than normal lower stratospheric discharges (typically around 17 milliseconds), and are triggered by the discharges of positive lightning between the thundercloud and the ground. Sprites often occur in clusters of two or more, and typically span the distance from 50 to 90 km (30 to 55 miles) above the earth, with what appear to be tendrils hanging below and branches reaching above. A 2007 paper reports that the apparent tendrils and branches of sprites are actually formed by bright streamer heads of less than 140 m diameter moving up or down at 1 to 10 percent of the speed of light. [21]

Sprites may be horizontally displaced by up to 50 km (30 miles) from the location of the underlying lightning strike, with a time delay following the lightning that is typically a few milliseconds, but on rare occasions may be up to 100 milliseconds. Sprites are sometimes, but not always, preceded by a sprite halo, a broad, pancake-like region of transient optical emission centered at an altitude of about 75 km above lightning. Sprite halos are produced by weak ionization from transient electric fields of the same type that causes sprites, but which are insufficiently intense to exceed the threshold needed for sprites. Sprites were first photographed on July 6, 1989, by scientists from the University of Minnesota and named after the mischievous sprite (air spirit) Ariel in Shakespeare's "The Tempest".

Recent research[22] carried out at the University of Houston in 2002 indicates that some normal (negative) lightning discharges produce a sprite halo, the precursor of a sprite, and that every lightning bolt between cloud and ground attempts to produce a sprite or a sprite halo. Research in 2004 by scientists from Tohoku University found that very low frequency emissions occur at the same time as the sprite, indicating that a discharge within the cloud may generate the sprites.[23]

[edit] Blue jets

Blue jets differ from sprites in that they project from the top of the cumulonimbus above a thunderstorm, typically in a narrow cone, to the lowest levels of the ionosphere 40 to 50 km (25 to 30 miles) above the earth.[citation needed] They are also brighter than sprites and, as implied by their name, are blue in color. They were first recorded on 21 October 1989, on a video taken from the space shuttle as it passed over Australia, and subsequently extensively documented in 1994 during aircraft research flights by the University of Alaska.[citation needed]

On 14 September 2001, scientists at the Arecibo Observatory photographed a huge jet double the height of those previously observed, reaching around 80 km (50 miles) into the atmosphere. The jet was located above a thunderstorm over the ocean, and lasted under a second. Lightning was initially observed traveling up at around 50,000 m/s in a similar way to a typical blue jet, but then divided in two and sped at 250,000 m/s to the ionosphere, where they spread out in a bright burst of light. On 22 July 2002, five gigantic jets between 60 and 70 km (35 to 45 miles) in length were observed over the South China Sea from Taiwan, reported in Nature. [24] The jets lasted under a second, with shapes likened by the researchers to giant trees and carrots.[citation needed]

[edit] Elves

Elves often appear as a dim, flattened, expanding glow around 400 km (250 miles) in diameter that lasts for, typically, just one millisecond.[25] They occur in the ionosphere 100 km (60 miles) above the ground over thunderstorms. Their color was a puzzle for some time, but is now believed to be a red hue. Elves were first recorded on another shuttle mission, this time recorded off French Guiana on October 7, 1990. Elves is a frivolous acronym for Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations From Electromagnetic Pulse Sources. This refers to the process by which the light is generated; the excitation of nitrogen molecules due to electron collisions (the electrons possibly having been energized by the electromagnetic pulse caused by a discharge from the Ionosphere).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning#External_links

Edited June 28, 2007 by Ghostkol

[Pax Unum]

Fate, karma, or random chance, it’s a bizarre death... IMO

[Picturesque Orion]

Fate, karma, or random chance, it’s a bizarre death... IMO

I say random chance, maybe we was just unlucky.

[Grandpa Greenman]

this was in florida? glad i dont live there any more lol

i think god doesnt like florida he attacks it with the craziest weather ever

I live in Florida, summer afternoons are pretty loud. I get to were I miss it in the winter weather get real boring, sunny and warm everyday. Summer is like the 4th of July every day. You can be a long way from a storm and get hit. I would love to go to the beach and take pictures of lighting over the gulf, but it is just to scary I might get hit.

It wasn't fate or karma that got that guy, just one of the joys of living in paradise.

[Picturesque Orion]

i think god doesnt like florida he attacks it with the craziest weather ever

So then God hates Cuba for attacking it with tropical storms, hurricanes and thunderstorms? Stop making this about God.......... God has nothing to do with this.....