Correlative Relationship Between the Intensity of Radiation for Ball Lightning and Its Typical Linear Dimension

Abstract

Ball lightning (BL) is a rare, nearly unknown form of thunderstorm electricity and has been studied during a long time. However, because it cannot be reproduced under laboratory conditions, the only source of new information on its properties is provided by eye witnesses and statistical analyses of their descriptions [1–5]. In this connection independent surveys of witnesses of ball lightnings have been conducted in a number of countries, concepts of BL emerging from these. The overall consistency in the “portraits” of an average BL obtained by independent investigators (see, for example, the reviews in [2,3]) is proof that the approach is reasonable. However, statistical analyses of eye witness information can provide, not only averaged data on some individual properties of BL, but also relations between these. The authors of [4,5] have tried to find correlative relationships between individual BL characteristics derived by averaging over large volumes of data. The present paper sets the same goal: 3115 descriptions of BL collected at Yaroslavl University are used to investigate paired correlation between BL brightness (playing the role of BL radiation intensity in the optical range) and typical linear dimension (diameter) by utilizing the technique described in [4,5].