@DjDerve Hi there, I'm with NBC News. Did you film this video this morning?! From where exactly? If so, will you give permission to NBCU to share it with our platforms and partners, with credit to you?
Seriously though, that is actually like a one in a million shot there! My best guess would be that both step leaders were developing from separate charge regions of the thunderstorm cloud at exactly the same instant in time, travelling downwards towards where the greatest potential difference was located on the ground below, but then the two step leaders got too close to each other and set off a discharge of the voltage difference between the two regions, which would have probably been much less than the potential between either source region and the ground, but nevertheless the two step leaders got too close at exactly the same time and then equalized the difference between those two regions instead of going to the ground. I would imagine there would have been an actual CG pretty soon after this bolt, no? Because normally if two step leaders are going down towards the ground at close to the same time, the one that gets to the ground first will initiate the discharge and the other one will probably just dump its charge into that channel or it could continuous path towards the ground as a its own separate strike. But in this case there must have been enough difference between the two regions that allowed a discharge to occur between those two regions instead of going to the ground.
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