‘Incredible video' captured during Alberta storm could be rare ball lightning event: scientist
Ed Pardy told Global News that he and his wife Melinda stepped onto the back porch of their home near Rich Valley, Alta., just before 7 p.m. to get a closer look at the storm passing through which featured fierce lightning all around, and also at one point triggered tornado watches and warnings in the region.
'After a rather vicious lightning strike, we saw a ball of fire kind of … about 20 feet above the ground,' he recalled. 'And it kind of stayed there in a big round ball.'
Melinda suggested capturing what they were seeing on video, and they were able to record about 23 seconds of the phenomenon until it seemed to disappear as quickly as it came about.
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'I was like, 'What is that?' It wasn't even the colour of fire,' she recounted, adding she wondered if it was some type of electric fireball. 'It was bluish in colour.
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'I've never seen anything like that before.'
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Ed described what they saw as a slowly moving 'bright orb of blue light' that he believes was about a metre or two metres in diameter.
'Before it went out there was a bit of a pop and the whole thing kind of disintegrated and went away,' he said. 'I was glad it was far away from our house.'
Global News showed the video to Frank Florian, senior manager of planetarium and space sciences at the TELUS World of Science in Edmonton.
He described it as 'an incredible video' of something 'very strange associated with severe weather conditions.'
He said he believes it is possible the Pardys saw ball lightning.
'It could be ball lightning or it could be something that's more of an artifact of a lightning strike itself,' he explained, adding that some scientists are researching the phenomenon of ball lightning and trying to recreate such events in laboratory settings.
'Ball lightning is a really cool event, but it's not really well understood because it's such a rare event.'
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Florian said the events are believed to unfold when there is plasma — a superheated gas — confined to a small area.
'Lightning itself is a plasma,' he said. 'You have an electrical path going through the sky from the cloud to the Earth, kind of meet up in the middle and it superheats the air really, really quickly, and it creates a plasma
'As that plasma expands very quickly, it creates the thunder that's associated with basically lightning strikes. But when you get plasma itself happening, being created by these lightning strikes, sometimes you can get that plasma itself — or region of plasma — to just linger for a little while.
'If it's in a ball shape, they call it ball lightning.'
Florian noted that lightning itself is a dangerous phenomenon, and that ball lightning sightings are 'pretty rare events.'
'They do create a spectacle,' he said.
When asked if what he saw frightened him, Ed indicated it hadn't.
'I was mostly curious,' he said. 'I like to see stuff like that.'
–With files from Kabi Moulitharan, Global News
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