Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night to find that there is an electrical storm happening on the other side of your very bedroom window? Have you ever wondered how it happened? Or why the lightning flashes?
How Is Lightning Formed?
The physics of lightning and thunder has been determined to be caused by the difference in charge between the thunder cloud and the foreign surface, such as a different layer of the cloud or the ground. Normally the cloud gains a positive or negative charge. When the difference between the two regions reaches a certain point, the air between the charges breaks down, allowing the two surfaces to form a circuit and discharge.
Lightneing Striking the ground.
Often enough when lightning strikes it is attracted to high objects such as trees or power poles. A lot of the time when a tree is struck by lightening the deadly amount of electricity runs through the tree and causes the bark to shoot off the tree at high speeds.
Scientists have no idea why the lightning bolt chooses to strike one place in particular and not another. But the scientists do know a few things about these electrical storms. They know that the path is first chosen by a small amount of electricity that comes out of a charged region that is up high in the clouds. It starts as a tiny spark in the clouds that is about 5 miles upwards form the ground. Then a small spurt of electrons rushes out of the cloud and then travels approximately 100 meters then stops for the tiniest amount of second, then pulls off in another direction and stops again and so on. Then throughout all of this the then branch of lightning splits and branches but this is still not a lightning bolt .it is called a stet bleeder. As the stet bleeder gets closer to the ground, it begins to have a pull effect on the ground itself. When it is 10 to 100 meters off the ground it realises that there is a surplus of negative electricity and some of the objects on the ground send up small stings and try to connect with the stet bleeder many things can send up the small strings that want to connect with the stet bleeder such as: one of the hairs on your head, a blade of grass, a telephone pole a tree plus many other things. And then when one of those small stings make a connection with the stet bleeder, then all of the electricity from the stet bleeder and all of its branches, and from the cloud itself drains into the object. This only ever lasts for a split second. Sometimes when the stet bleeder connects with one of those tiny strings they branches of lightening can break living a branch in mid air. It is almost impossible to take a photo of this phenomenon but there have been some photos taken.
Next time you wake up to find yourself looking out of your window at an electrical storm think about how it all works and enjoy the fantastic ways of Mother Nature.
References:
For more information and to look at some amazing footage you can look up the video in which I got my information at:
http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery-channel/406-discovery-wonders-of-weather-lightning-phenomena-video.htm
