Lightning of Varied Color? Or Not?

I got a question about the color of lightning, that a reader claims to have seen different colors of lightning. Is this guy nuts? No he is not, he is correct. The color of lightning can appear to vary significantly from the bright white color it actually is.

Lightning is very hot (at times can reach temperatures of 54,000 degrees for very brief moments) and hence emits light that appears to the human eye to be nearly white if it is close and in open air away from clouds. However, if lightning is far away and low in the sky, the observer will be looking through a long distance of Earth’s atmosphere at that distant lightning. In a clear atmosphere distant lightning appears yellowish, the farther away the yellower. If the atmosphere is dirty/smoggy, then distant lightning will appear to be more orange in color.

Large hail within a thunderstorm absorbs the longer wavelengths of light leaving the shorter blues and greens to be seen by a ground observer; hence the general rule that if the sky turns greenish in color and it is raining, then expect hail! This greenish sky caused by hail can give a tint to lightning of similar greenish color making it appear greenish in color.

Near sunrise and sunset when the sky can turn colors of orange, pink and red, some of this light can illuminate the lightning bolt and make it appear a similar color to that of the background clouds. Check out the lightning photo I have on my facebook page that clearly shows what appears to be a “pink lightning bolt” only within a few miles of my iPhone camera when I snapped that picture. I have rarely seen lightning appear as vividly pink as in that photo, but it was clearly caused by the color hues from clouds at sunset contaminating the white lightning bolt.

So yes the ground observer can see lightning that “appears” to be many different colors…but the lightning bolt itself is always pretty close to white. The atmosphere, hail, distance, clouds and sunrise/sunset can at times give the bolt the appearance of many different color shades to the ground observer. Some of these color variations can tell you about how close or far the lightning might be; very yellow lightning normally is so far away that the audio thunder from it dissipates before it ever gets to you…so deep yellow lightning is often seen by your eyes, but is silent to the ear. 🙂