Preliminary report on the alleged March 27, 2012,
Quito, Ecuador, ball lightning video
Alexander G. Keul¹, Karl Stephan², and Walter Aldaz³
¹ Vienna University of Technology, 1040 Vienna, Austria, [email protected]
² Ingram School of Engineering, Texas State University, 601 University Drive, San Marcos, TX 78666, USA
³ General Manager, Construcciones Priseli, Quito, Ecuador
Abstract
Preliminary field investigation results of an alleged ball lightning video record from the countryside
near Quito, Ecuador, South America, filmed on March 27, 2012, are presented. Local fieldwork was
done by a construction manager who contacted the BL researchers. The video was recorded during a
severe thunderstorm in the Andes mountain ranges. Appearing near a 13.2 kV power line, BL lasted
for about 2 seconds and followed a straight, then erratic trajectory over the ground. 28 single frames of
the Nokia cellphone video contain interesting physical information which will be further analyzed and
reported to the BL community.
FIGURE 1. Location at Yanazarapata, Quito (yellow star)
“Monte Akira” is an 18 houses development located at 2,530 meters above sea level on a hillside in
San Juan Alto, Cumbayá, Quito City, Ecuador (Fig.1) within the "Urbanización Yanazarapata". At the
entrance to the gated community, security guards have their shacks. On the afternoon of March 27,
2012, the weather conditions went bad, with heavy rain, hail, lightning and thunder. At 15:11 hours
local time, one guard started to video record the storm with his Nokia E71 mobile phone to catch some
lightning nearby. Immediately afterwards, he observed a luminous ball that seemed to come from the
direction of the opposite shack, moved over the street to a tree group, made a circling turn and flew off
quickly.
A few days later, the third author went to “Monte Akira” to review the construction work, heard about
the video, watched it, thought that it must be very rare, so started to check the internet for more
information, where he came across ICBL and the name of the second author. He sent him the Nokia
E71 cellphone video as mp4-file on April 10 to share this information with researchers. Positive
reactions came from the second and first authors and from Geert Dijkhuis, ICBL. It was decided to
investigate the alleged ball lightning (BL) video case. Without travel funds, the investigation consists
of fieldwork done by the third author in cooperation with his co-authors who analyzed the data. A
preliminary report with first results is presented to ISBL at AIS-2012 and will be developed into a
final report.
The third author is a mechanical engineer graduated from the University of New Orleans in 1987 who
worked overseas in the oil industry and now as General Manager of his own housing developing
company in Ecuador. He supplied the first report, sent the mp4 video file, CAD maps of the site and
explanatory photographs. For analysis of the BL trajectory, site measurements were taken.
The first author found that on March 27, 2012, Quito airport (SEQU) at 2,812 m altitude above sea
level reported a heavy thunderstorm with hail at 2 and 3 P.M. local time. It continued to rain and hail
at times until 5:30 P.M. and a thunderstorm was still reported at 4 P.M. Temperature dropped from
18°C before to 10°C after the rainfall. Wind direction changed from northeast to southeast with 6
m/sec speed at 2 P.M. [1]. So the meteorological conditions were exactly as reported by the witness.
Quito, the capital of the (equatorial) Republic of Ecuador, with a population of 2.2 millions, is the
second highest capital in the world lying at 2,850 m above sea level. The city is located on a long
plateau in the Guayllabamba river basin with volcanoes on either sides. Quito has a subtropical
highland climate with “year-round spring”. The housing development “Monte Akira” was built in
2011 on a mountainside near Cumbayá east of central Quito.
FIGURE 2a. Observation and video location
FIGURE 2b. Guard who recorded BL
At the entrance of the “Monte Akira” development (see Fig.2a), two guard shacks stand 9 meters
apart. The surface is partly a rubble road and partly a concrete pavement. Two local power and
telephone lines intersect at the observation spot. Several cables run parallel with a 13.2 kV power line
on top, two 120V phases, a neutral line, a streetlight control line and telephone cables. Power and
telephone pole 1 (Fig.2a) is 12 meters distant from the BL observation shack. An enquiry at the local
power company EEQ about possible power interruptions due to lightning is still in progress.
The third author wrote that the guard started recording with his cellphone camera pointing SSW along
the rubble road and the wall of the development (landmarks see Fig.3), then he saw a cloud-groundlightning flash behind the development, i.e. easterly, before BL was recorded. As the alleged BL
appears after about 6 recorded seconds without lightning or thunder on the video, the record did only
start after the CG flash. Then, the luminous object appears on the video for about 2 seconds. After its
disappearance, the guard continued recording hoping to catch some lightning, which he did not, as
only heavy rain is noticeable on the rest of the 69 seconds record.
FIGURE 3. Landmarks at Quito BL site.
The video file was recorded with a Nokia E71 cellphone. From the mp4 file metainfo it was learnt that
the video has 320x240 resolution (QVGA), a 15 pictures/sec rate and a stereo audio track. The total
mp4 record sent from Ecuador is 1.3 MB and runs for 69 seconds. Between seconds 6 and 8, the
alleged BL sequence was recorded. Broken down into single frames with VLC by the first author, it
lasts for 28 single frames, i.e. with 15 fps two frames less than 2 seconds and one frame every 66.7
milliseconds. The video record starts with a brilliant core of light with a halo moving into the frame
from left to right, from a position near the development wall towards a small embankment between
rubble and concrete road with some small trees. There, it comes to a short standstill, moves backwards
and finally speeds up and disappears in rapid flight to the right behind the door of the shack and the
video frame. Fig.4 a to c show single frames from the first, rather straight, part of the trajectory
leading to the small trees. Fig.5 a to c show frames of the retrograde movement and the final burst of
speed.
FIGURES 4a-c. Single frames 2, 5, 10 – first part of trajectory until standstill
FIGURES 5a-c. Single frames 15, 23, 27 – backward motion and final rapid flight
While an accurate photoanalysis must await further investigation of the site with regard to location and
angle data for the camera location and vectors to fixed objects identifiable in the video, the second
author made an approximate initial analysis based on computer maps of the location and image
analysis using the open-source image analysis software ImageJ (available at http://rsbweb.nih.gov/ij/).
X-Y pixel locations of the most intense part of the BL object were converted into angles with respect
to a reference location on the ground (the left edge of the green embankment, visible in many of the 28
frames showing the object). An estimated ground track of the object provided by the third author
(Fig.6) from information given by the eyewitnesses was used to plot ground-track locations for each
frame by running radii from the estimated camera location to the ground track. If the horizontal
(azimuth) angle between the BL object and the reference location is known, the radius representing the
line of sight to the BL object can be plotted on a map, and the intersection between the line of sight
and the estimated ground track is the location of the object in that frame. This procedure is limited in
accuracy by the accuracy of the ground track and estimates of the pixel-to-angle conversion constant,
but we believe these estimates give the true ground location within ±2 m or so. The fact that the BL
object appears against a background of known locations provides a limit on the maximum distance
that the object could have been from the camera.
The results of these calculations are shown in the ground-track map (Fig.6).
FIGURE 6. Schematic map of BL object ground track as estimated from time-independent ground track and
angles measured from video frames. Numbers on track indicate number of video frame from time the object
became visible. Total time elapsed from frame 1 to frame 28 is approximately 1.8 sec.
Although vertical angle data was obtainable from the video as well, it cannot be used to derive true
altitude above ground without further information from the site. It is notable that the object’s altitude
angle stayed within ±1 degree of a constant value, implying that the object’s height was nearly
constant during the time of visibility in the video.
Knowledge of distance from the camera and relative times from the video frame rate of 15/sec allows
the calculation of average velocity over small intervals. This was done for selected frame intervals
with average times shown in the velocity-versus-time graph in Fig.7.
FIGURE 7. Average velocity versus time (m/s) from frame 1 of video for selected intervals.
The object enters the camera’s field of view with a velocity of about 10 m/s, appears to accelerate
briefly, then comes nearly to a halt for several frames (13-20) before resuming motion and
accelerating out of the picture at a peak velocity on the order of 50 m/s. Regarding the object’s size,
the fuzzy outline produces a Gaussian-shaped peak in intensity, so one appropriate objective measure
of object size is the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of the pixel intensity, where the maximum is
measured with respect to the object’s local background. Using this criterion, which probably
underestimates total visual size, the object appears to shrink from an initial size of 29 cm in diameter
in frame 2, to 19 cm in frame 13 and 12 cm in frame 27, just before it leaves the field of view.
Inverted black-and-white frames (example: Fig.8, frame 2) and 6-cycle-equidensites (example: Fig.9,
frame 2) by the first author show that the light source was not exactly circular/globular, but oval in
several stages of the process. On most frames, it is an inner core with a fainter halo around.
FIGURE 8. Inverted black-and-white, frame 2
FIGURE 9. 6-cycle-equidensite, frame 2
The alleged Quito BL video offers interesting material for further field investigation and video
analysis, which will follow. The short duration, irregular behavior and brightness variations of the
yellowish ball reminds one of the April 19, 2003, Zwoenitz, Germany, webcam video already studied
at length [2]. With more automatic stations (as CCTV) and the spread of cellphone video technology,
the probability of interesting BL records is likely to increase [3].
References
1. Wunderground, Quito airport weather March 27, 2012, obtained at www.wunderground.com
2. A. G. Keul, A possible ball lightning webcam record from Zwoenitz, Germany. The Journal of Meteorology,
2004 29, pp.168-173.
3. K. Stephan, J. Bunnell, J. Klier and L. Komala-Noor, Quantitative intensity and location measurements of an
intense longduration luminous object near Marfa, Texas. The Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial
Physics, 2011 73, 13, pp.1953-1958.