You’ve seen a fire tornado in slow-motion, now check out this amazing photo showing how lightning rods work during an electrical storm, as captured by a high-speed camera. Simply put, lightning rods located atop nearby buildings produce positive upward discharges and compete to connect to the downward strike.
The research team from Brazil’s National Space Research Institute (INPE), led by Marcelo Saba, used a high-speed camera that captured images at 40,000 frames per second. This allowed them to observe a total of 31 lightning precursor channels from nearby buildings that were ready to intercept the downcoming negative leaders. These strikes can be as long as 100 kilometers and transport electric currents as strong as 30,000amps.
The image was captured on a summer evening in São José dos Campos while a negatively charged lightning bolt was nearing the ground at 370 km per second. When it was a few dozen meters from ground level, lightning rods and tall objects on the tops of nearby buildings produced positive upward discharges, competing to connect to the downward strike. The final image prior to the connection was obtained 25 thousandths of a second before the lightning hit one of the buildings,” said Marcelo Saba, a researcher at Brazil’s National Space Research Institute (INPE).