What Do You Know About Lightning?

[elity-sitio]

^{Yesterday it rained heavily in my house and there where a lot of lightning before and during the down pour of the rain. I have seen different types of lightning and so few cases, it can lead to destruction of properties and casualties. Although, lightning we are all familiar with the striking lines of light above the sky, a lot of us do not understand lightning, and scientists are still learning it.}

^{The sky has a combination of positive and negative charges and thunderstorm has the ability to separate the pools of charges which leads to the creation of electric fields. That light you see is originated by the interaction between two oppositely charged regions where leaders (network of electrically conductive channels) materializes, connecting a path through the conductive air.}

^wikimedia

^{With lightning, the leaders (the light you see that give the strike) branch off in two opposite directions with each having two opposite polarities in an attempt to neutralize the charge. The lightning you see within storms in the cloud are known as cloud flashes or intra-cloud lightning but when you see a lightning with two directions where the leader network has one of its direction to the cloud and the other to the ground surface or an object is referred to as a ground flash or you can also call it a cloud-to-ground lightning.}

^{When there is a cloud-to-ground lightning, it happens because the step leader coming from the sky comes with a negatively charged current to the ground where an oppositely charged leader from the ground begins to go up in other to bridge the gap and when they meet, electrons are sent from the cloud to the ground (Return Stroke) through that channel. You would notice that when this occurs, there is extreme heating along the bright flash from the lightning. This event leads to a shockwave that transitions into an acoustic wave through a few meters.}

^Needpix

^{Cloud to Ground lightening can be as hot as 30,000o Celsius which is enough to fry anything, so when you see a chicken being roasted by lightning in your animation, they are not exaggerating. The CGs can be positive accounting for 5%to 10% of all ground flash, or negative CG can come as Tornado alley which as you would have guessed is accompanied by strong storm.}

^{We can also have upward lightning known as ground to cloud lightning which travels up from tall objects to the sky which is triggered by a nearby lightning flash. While you might want to assume that all lightning comes from upwards to the ground, a lot of lightning move from down to the top and they come from tall objects causing change in electric field.}

^{For those who want to know, lightning strikes upwards, downwards, and in horizontal form and this is the best answer to give since it is charges combining together through leader channels but understanding how lightning works is still a course that scientist are still learning and they are getting groundbreaking breakthroughs in it because that is part of how I am able to learn the little I am sharing with you.}

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^Reference

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^{https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-science-electrification https://www.noaa.gov/jetstream/lightning/positive-and-negative-side-of-lightning https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/storms/thunder-and-lightning https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S037015731300375X https://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/home/lightning/home/primer/primer2.html https://www.livescience.com/34245-lightning-mystery.html https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/lightning/types/ https://www.rmets.org/metmatters/types-lightning https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-science-types-flashes https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/239-lightning-explained}

Comments

[ireti]

Lightning is something I just as everyone is familiar with. Thanks for explaining the thunder associated with it. I used to tell people that once they have heard the thunder, the lightning already did its strike and this post just confirmed it. Thanks for sharing.

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