G'day and thanks for your questions guys. Mike, the warmness I have felt from the streamers is a very strange sensation indeed but I don't recall hearing any buzzing while taking this video footage (from the image above in Russ' backyard) as it was hailing at the time, it could well have been though? A good friend of mine has experienced that while out photographing a storm in Albury, NSW quite recently, telling me that a street sign behind him was buzzing fairly loudly but it wasn't hit (lucky for him!), I could tell you without a doubt if heard an object buzzing while in a storm I don't think I'd hang around lol!
I have shown numerous people these streamers in my front yard during a storm and I can assuredly tell you they are blown away! My father is 70yrs old and even he could see pink flashes as I pointed them out? We were lucky enough to see one during that storm about 3mtrs in front of us and was 4mtrs or so high. It appeared in front of a dark tree so it was easy to spot. One thing I should probably add here is that most of our town is situated on ironstone ridges so that may add to the frequency of them? I can say that the storm doesn't need to be overhead for streamer activity and I find the best times to see them are when the storm cell is about a kilometer or so away, just as long as it's a very active cell.
I did do a few other frame out-takes to send to Michael Bath so I will show you here-
This image above was the very first couple of positive streamers I captured (at a low resolution unfortunately) in my front yard. The first frame is Russell shooting the storm in the distance. Frame 2 is the first streamer I ever found in footage (bottom left, in front of the jade plant), it is about a metre in front of us (Russ was standing beside me at this point), in the footage I saw the streamer as a pink flash and had asked Russ if his camera flash had gone off accidently, that was the point at which I knew you could see these strange characters! Frame 3 is a pretty large streamer with a step leader (the faint white article at the top) about 8metres away from us! I have to add here that in the actual video Russ had gone out to stand in the street (on my left) to get a clear shot of some nice cg's just as the streamer touched down! I'd hate to think what would've happened if it had arced together and grounded a bolt? The actual strike was some distance to our left and out of the shot. Frame 4 shows how far away the actual active part of the storm cell was.
This is the only actual frame by frame I have done. I wish I had pointed the camera down a little more? The streamers are numerous here in the bottom right corner of the first frame. The second frame is the distant strike with what I've termed as a "floating streamer" beside it. More streamers again in the third frame of the set (showing up red again in the bottom right corner), then a cg reminant in frame 4. All these frames are at 1/24th of a second and shot in my back yard. I have to apologise for the small size of these images. (I will try and grab a few larger ones for you when I regain my image editing software)
I have caught a recent positive streamer coming from a tree in the distance, possibly as far away as 50mtrs, with a nice step leader reaching towards it, no cg in sight though, only a small crawler? We will post the video's on ridgelightning.com as soon as we can : )
Best reguards,
Shauno.
