Possible detection of visible light and γ rays from a swarm of ball lightning

Hazards to Aircraft Crews, Passengers, and Equipment from Thunderstorm-Generated X-rays and Gamma-Rays

“…Assumptions about the radiation hazard of some ball lightning is in agreement with several other reports about physical and biological effects that were or could be caused by ball lightning (see, e.g., [24,28,31,55,56] and bibliographies therein). For example, Garfield [56] considered an accident described by Cowgill [61] as associated with ball lightning.…”

“…The time of registration of visible light and gamma-rays was about 15 min [20]. According to one of the proposed interpretations of these observational data, the visible light and gamma-rays were emitted by a swarm of ball lightning [28]. Several examples of possible sets of the distance between ball lightning and the detector of gamma-rays (plastic scintillator) and ball lightning parameters have been presented.…”

“…Gamma-ray fluxes, described as gamma-ray glows, etc., can last from seconds to minutes, and can produce gamma-ray photons with numbers exceeding the normal background level in some spectral ranges at least by one to two decades, while situations when the intensity of the glow is of the order of 10% of the background are also described [4,5,[13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]26,27]. In principle, the generation of several subsequent and/or time-overlapping glows seems to be possible (see, e.g., [20,28]). In some situations, such processes can be interpreted as the generation of one glow with a relatively long duration.…”

“…The detection of gamma-ray glows by ground-based or roof-mounted equipment is hampered by the absorption and scattering of photons by air, although this problem is reduced if observations are made at high-altitude mountain observatories or of thunderstorms with low-altitude charge-containing regions [4,5,13,14,[17][18][19][20][21]23,[26][27][28]30,31]. However, the altitudes at which commercial jet aircraft fly and the possibility of relatively short distances between the main region of the emission of high-energy photons and the aircraft mean that the aircraft are much less protected from such radiation by the air than is the case at ground level.…”

“…However, the altitudes at which commercial jet aircraft fly and the possibility of relatively short distances between the main region of the emission of high-energy photons and the aircraft mean that the aircraft are much less protected from such radiation by the air than is the case at ground level. It should be emphasized that there are several different assumptions about the physical nature of gamma-ray glows (see, e.g., [12,15,18,20,[22][23][24]26,28,29] and bibliographies therein). According to one author, some gamma-ray glows are generated by ball lightning [22,24,28,31].…”