Claude Clemmons

posted by Claude on Jun 13

I’m the first to admit that I am obsessed with the weather. I keep an ear and an eye out for weather alerts and watch the skies for signs of rain or storms. I’m especially cautious when it comes to lightning, as a good friend of mine was killed in a lightning strike just a couple years ago.

For years pilots and other non-scientists have known about a natural phenomenon with lightning, called Sprites. These are short bursts of light that rise up above the storm clouds and then fall back down into the cloud. They last for just the blink of an eye, so it was hard to capture them on film until this past decade or so. Now we do have cameras and video of the sprites and they look like amazingly like jellyfish for their short violent lives. I saw a video of sprites on the LiveScience web site.