Photos: Craig Shimala
For most residents of the Windy City, this April's storms haven’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary. But for Chicago-based freelance videographer Craig Shimala, the storms that rolled through Monday, April 22, 2019 afforded a great shot. For most photographers it might have been the shot of a lifetime, but Shimala has been here, done that before (see bottom video from 2014).
Shimala's April 2019 video, shot from his fifth-floor balcony, is electrifying (below). Not one, two or three—but four lightning bolts zap the city’s tallest buildings all at once in a dazzling display of electrical discharge.
But these aren’t ordinary lightning bolts. They’re the elusive upward lightning.A slowed-down video reveals the curious orientation of the bolts. Frame by frame, it’s easy to see the inch-thick tendrils of electricity leaping from the tips of buildings as drenching rains sweep through the city.
All towers struck were more than one thousand feet tall.
When powerful positive cloud-to-ground lightning strikes, it quickly enhances and disrupts the electrical field nearby. That can trigger a positive upward leader to hop off objects to neutralize the charge imbalance. One can make out the dendrite-like horizontal branches as the lightning distributes charge throughout the cloud base.
Each pulse of light is another surge of current flowing through the channel. It’s like pinching a garden hose — intermittent bursts punctuated by lulls as the following wave washes through. A typical lightning flash can have several dozen individual rushes of electrical charge.
Most upward lightning is man-made. How? It simply wouldn’t occur in most cases if the buildings or wind turbines weren’t there. In the wintertime, tall pointed objects — such as radio/television transmission towers or skyscrapers — can focus charge and throw lightning bolts in the middle of a blizzard!
Despite how remarkable it may seem, barrages of upward lightning in Chicago have become the new normal thanks to the cluster of skyscrapers. Similar episodes happened in 2014, 2017, 2018 and probably countless other times. But it’s spectacular every time. The most important science to know about upward lightning, is that it primarily occurs when there is a nearby positive cloud-to-ground flash. The electric field change caused by the preceding flash causes an upward positive leader to initiate from a tall object such as a building, tower or wind turbine. It is the shape of the tall object and the resulting enhancement in the electrical field that makes it possible for an upward leader to form following a nearby flash. Some scientists call this lightning-triggered upward lightning, meaning that the upward leader would not develop if the tall object was not present. This is shown below in a fascinating high-speed video.
Vitaliy Zdanovich
Lately he's sporting just a moustache, which we guess is a Russian thing, but he rocks it either way. We prefer the full beard Vitaliy, if you're listening.
Vitaliy apparently moonlights as an underwear model. Who knew that was a thing in Putin's Russia? The things Agent Orange has taught us.
Now if we can find some of Vitaliy's work on Netflix. . .
Vitaliy does not appear in IMDB's database, so we don't really know where to start looking for him.
any sightings should be reported back here. . .
