Thunderstorms - do you like them - or do you fear them?

[Leo123]

My mother would have ripped your arm off to get you into her bedroom to hide until the lightening was over.

Ya, better to lose an arm than get turned to toast by a bolt of lightning. Just joking.

 

[toobfreak]

Yes, you could be in a charged area ready to connect to a streamer from the clouds to a ground charged 'shadow.' You can't see streamers though.

The bottom tip of a lightning bolt traveling from a cloud to the ground (or from ground to cloud as is more often the case) travel at much less than the speed of light. A lightning discharge consists of electrons which have been stripped from their molecules flying through the air. They are accelerated by a strong electric field, a consequence of the big voltage difference between the cloud and the ground. They crash into air molecules on their way down and free other electrons, making a tube of ionized air.

The "leader", the first stroke of a lightning discharge, actually proceeds in steps -- lengthening by about 30 meters at a time, taking about a microsecond (one millionth of a second) to do each step. There is a pause between steps of about 50 microseconds. The whole process may take a few milliseconds (one-thousandth of a second), providing enough time to perceive motion. Most of the charge flows after this leader makes electrical contact between the cloud and ground, however. A powerful "return stroke" releases much more energy. A lightning flash may have only one return stroke or may have several strokes using the same column of ionized air. It may seem to flicker.

Understanding Lightning: Initiation of a Stepped Leader

 

[initforme]

I like the rotating t storms

 

[toobfreak]

I like the rotating t storms

I don't. I never want to see them. They scare the crap out of me. If you see a rotating thunderstorm, that is a sure sign that the storm has gained enough energy and organization to begin to do real serious damage. Maybe begin to produce tornadoes.

A tornado is partly the result of the lowering of the wall cloud close enough to the Earth to allow positive feedback from the drag and interaction between the storm, the tropopause, and the earth. At this point, the storm probably has enough energy in it equal to an atomic bomb.