Forked lighting appears as jagged lines of light. They can have several branches. Forked lightning can be seen shooting from the clouds to the ground, from one cloud to another cloud, or from a cloud out into the air.
This lightning can strike up to 10 miles away from a thunderstorm. What is sheet lightning? Sheet lightning appears as flashes of light that seem to light up or illuminate entire clouds.
What is heat lightning? Heat lightning is a term used to describe lightning flashes that are too far away from you to hear the thunder. The reason that it is called heat lightning is that it appears most often on a hot summer day when the sky is clear overhead.
What is high-altitude lightning? High-altitude lightning has been given other names such as "red sprites," "green elves," and "blue jets. You can't see these types of lightning from the ground.
What is ribbon lightning? Ribbon lightning is when a bolt of lightning separates due to wind and appears as parallel lightning streaks. What is chain or bead lightning? Chain or bead lightning is when a lightning bolt is broken into dotted lines while fading. What is ball lightning? Ball lightning is a rare form of lightning. It usually appears as a reddish, luminous ball, but can come in any color. Ball lightning is usually spherical in shape and about one foot in diameter.
Hissing noises originate from such balls and they sometimes make a loud noise when they explode. What is St. Elmo's Fire? Elmo's Fire appears as a blue or greenish glow above pointed objects on the ground. It is created when tiny positively charged sparks reach up in response to negatively charges in the air or clouds above the ground.
If a thunderstorm is nearby, St. Elmo's Fire might be seen right before a lightning strike. What is anvil lightning? Anvil lightning is a type of lightning referred to as "the bolt from the blue" because it often appears suddenly from a seemingly cloudless sky. A bolt at the top of a thunderstorm arcs away from the main cloud and strikes the ground where the skies above often appear clear.
Can you tell how far away a storm is? Yes, you can use thunder to tell how far away a storm is. Well, lightning causes thunder. Lightning is a discharge of electricity. This extreme heating causes the air to expand explosively fast. The expansion creates a shock wave that turns into a booming sound wave, known as thunder.
As ice crystals high within a thunderstorm cloud flow up and down in the turbulent air, they crash into each other. Small negatively charged particles called electrons are knocked off some ice and added to other ice as they crash past each other.
Lightning begins as static charges in a rain cloud. Winds inside the cloud are very turbulent. Water droplets in the bottom part of the cloud are caught in the updrafts and lifted to great heights where the much colder atmosphere freezes them. Meanwhile, downdrafts in the cloud push ice and hail down from the top of the cloud. Where the ice going down meets the water coming up, electrons are stripped off. It's a little more complicated than that, but what results is a cloud with a negatively charged bottom and a positively charged top.
These electrical fields become incredibly strong, with the atmosphere acting as an insulator between them in the cloud. Lightning happens. The electric field "looks" for a doorknob.
Sort of. It is estimated that a lightning strike hits somewhere on the Earth's surface approximately 44 times every second, a total of nearly 1. Owing to the fact thunderstorms are created by intense heating of the Earth's surface, they are most common in areas of the globe where the weather is hot and humid. Landmasses, therefore, experience more storms than the oceans and thunderstorms are also more frequent in tropical areas than the higher latitudes.
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