Is this type of lightning possible?

[Guest StrayJay]

When I was a kid, I joined my parents on holiday to Spain. They had rented a cabin on a hill slope that gave a 90 degree view of (mostly) the Mediterranean Sea.

 

One day there was a heavy storm, with thunder and lightning. The strange thing that I remember some 25 years later, is that the lightning would start to strike in the East, "into the Sea", and then what seemed to be (it went very quicky, obviously!) the exact same jolt of lightning would strike a couple of degrees counter-clockwise to the first jolt. This would repeat itself until the jolts reached the far end of the aforemention 90 degree view we had.

 

However, all this seems very unlikely to me now, and I'm wondering: is this really possible, or has time changed my memory of this event? I've never witnessed anything like this ever again.

 

Thank you in advance for nay insights.

[fuhrerkeebs]

I don't see any reason why it's not possible, but I have no clue how probable it is.

[5614]

with lightning, most stuff is probable, but i couldnt say for certain, cant see why not though.

 

probably, [you know how lightning works?] there was a particuarly charged cloud, and that was just how the wind happened to be blowing the cloud..... dunno, its a guess!

[Guest StrayJay]

with lightning' date=' most stuff is probable, but i couldnt say for certain, cant see why not though.

 

probably, [you know how lightning works?'] there was a particuarly charged cloud, and that was just how the wind happened to be blowing the cloud..... dunno, its a guess!

 

There were two things that seem strange to me now:

 

1) the fact that the jolts were 'repeated'. This repetition took place way too fast to be caused by a drifting cloud. The lightnings seemed to take place in the distance, yet they travelled a 90 degree angle in (as I remember it) maybe a 1 second time span.

 

2) The jolts all seemed identical. Obviously, considering any single jolt only takes a fraction of a second, it's hard to see if they really are identical. But being intrigued by the phenomenon, I remember spending quite some time observing it and I came to the conclusion that they were exactly the same.

 

The first point seems strange to me now because I'd never seen this happen before, have not seen it since, and I've never heard or read about it.

 

The seond point seems strange, because: how can two jolts look identical? It's not like one jolt can tell the next jolt to present itself in any particular way --as a Comp Sci major I can only imagine how much bandwidth it would take to convey that amount of information in such a short time span...

[Edward]

EM storms can be really strange I havent hearde of that before.

On the topic of lightning i once saw a small cloud over lake champliain on a sunny day and it was flashing yellow and small bolts of lightning coming out of it. THAT was weird!