This shows the "ball lightning" leaders to a bolt, and disproves the old saying that lightning never strikes in the same place twice. If you notice, it repeatedly hits exactly the same spot, through the same discharge channel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfYiFSTkBWk
Some energetic balls that can't seem to decide which way to go... not what you'd expect if the ground was a huge, attractive charge:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6PCzKwjYWs
Then you have the mesospheric lightning, known as a SPRITE, which appears shortly after a substantial ground strike down lower:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uo4nZtxMow
If you continue on looking through the videos, there are now FOUR different kinds of visible lightning that occur during a thunderstorm, and TWO invisible kinds...
- Tropospheric lightning, the common flashes to ground and across the tropopause.
- Blue Jets that shoot upward from the tops of thunder clouds, into the stratosphere.
- SPRITES, in the mesosphere, that seem to drop down from the mesopause (mesosphere/thermosphere boundary) and explode, downward in a kind of electrical shower.
- ELVES, which are red "bubbles" that appear in the thermosphere and have been seen/videoed by the ISS.
- Invisible X-ray lightning (dark lightning), that is usually stratospheric, but also occurs on "positive lightning" that comes up from something pointy on the ground.
- Invisible Gamma ray lightning, that occurs in a burst in the upper parts of the atmosphere.
Also notice that lightning starts with a bright flash, then puts out the streamers and when one of those streamer balls its the ground, you then get the discharge.
In the RS, this behavior is consistent with COSMIC RAY DECAY, not static electricity. The flash is a consequence of cosmic matter entering the material environment (see the Cosmic Matter/Ray sections in NBM for details). Only the magnetic rotation can stabilize itself in the new environment, by exchanging a unit of speed for a unit of energy. In the magnetic system, it becomes a 4-n situation, such that c-Helium, (2)-(1)-0 can become materially stable as m-Argon 3-2-0.
However, the electrical rotation and any vibratory components (anything less than motion in all 3 scalar dimensions), will get "cast off" in the process--namely, electrons, electric rotation, thermal motion, and photons (charge). This would make the lightning, in all these forms, more of a decay product of c-matter entering the material environment, rather than some kind of electrical phenomena. (Essentially a type of "radioactive decay" at a much accelerated rate, as described by Gustave LeBon in The Evolution of Matter.)
Doing some follow-up research on ball lightning (Rainer's favorite topic), I have come to the conclusion that a cosmic ray event is insufficient to describe all these phenomena. What is required is a cosmic-material exchange, where not only cosmic matter enters the material sector, but the inverse situation also occurs--material matter enters the cosmic sector. What you then have is two ranges of effects, the sublight-to-FTL transition, dumping visible light and RF (flashes and radio noise, very common with lightning) of m-matter being accelerated to FTL motion, and the conjugate FTL-to-sublight transition of the incoming cosmic matter, dumping X-rays, gamma rays and neutrinos.
I postulate that there is some kind of catalyst that goes on during thunderstorms that lowers the threshold that keeps the material and cosmic atoms apart, allowing brief--and explosive--exchanges.
Now as to the cause... lightning seems to occur most frequently at thermal transitions, such as the high/low pressure systems of hot/cold air meeting, or during volcanic eruptions, where super-hot air is meeting the ice-cold air of the mountaintops. I have not come to any conclusions as to how this works yet.
Of course, it also "begs the question" as to whether thunderstorms produce lightning, or does something else create this rupture, and cause the thunderstorm to form around it? 96% of lightning strikes are in the tropics, curiously coinciding with the densest aggregation of life (deserts don't seem to have much lightning). In the northern hemisphere, the United States is the most active for lightning, in a belt running from Texas up the Appalachians. Storms leaving that area tend to drift with the Gulf Stream to the British Isles, so the folks in England are just getting "left-overs" from the storms in the U.S.
So if you have some time, take a look at some of these high-speed videos (and others), and I'd like to hear your thoughts about lightning--particularly ball lightning, if you've heard of it.