Ground to sky lightning in Oklahoma City on May 18 2017.
Ground to sky lightning in Oklahoma City on May 18 2017.
It's the video that you can't take your eyes off of! Storms in Oklahoma City last night produced lots of lightning. But it's this video here that has many wondering " How did it do this?"


There are 2 thoughts to this.

1- TV towers are manmade objects thus creating "unnatural" electric potential. In this case we'd call this a "ground-to-cloud" lightning strike. The towers, which likely had a positive charge to it, generated lightning that then moved toward an area in the sky that had a negative charge. Remember opposites attract.

2- Or thought #2. Most lightning strikes actually begin to occur before you ever notice it. It all begins when an invisible channel begins to form from the cloud to the ground. This is when the charges start to take place (and in most case when you would begin to feel the hairs on your neck stand up). As the charge builds you see the return strike return back into the sky and this is the lightning strike we typically see with our naked eye. However you would need a very fast video camera that shot hundreds of frames per second in order to see this process happen. If you look at these type of videos then you'll actually see the lightning slowly move from the ground up. But because the entire process happens so fast then you typically don't see that. Instead you see the "cloud to ground" lightning strike.

The more I study this video the more I believe that #1 is the more accurate reasoning to how this lightning strike happened. When manmade objects interact with the atmosphere then all sorts of wild things can happen.

And that's what we saw here.