Lightning fell really close to me today - anybody else had lightning striking too close for comfort?

[Walken_After_Midnight]

@TroutMan

Because it’s a fun fact, not because I’m trying to be pedantic: the lightning actually rose 10-15m away from you, not fell. A typical lightning strike is initiated by a flow of negative charge down from the cloud. As it approaches the ground (50-100 m), a positive streamer reaches up and meets the downward ladder, at which point a return stroke goes from ground to sky. This return stroke is what you see.

Check out the lightning strike when the video starts playing. Pause the video and use the “,” and “.” keys to move backwards and forwards, frame by frame. With this strike, one can visibly see, in one frame, the return stroke starting from the ground. According to Wikipedia, “the rate at which the return stroke current travels has been found to be around 100,000 km/s.”