What Is Lightning?

Lightning is a giant spark of electricity in the atmosphere between clouds, the air, or the ground. In the early stages of development, air acts as an insulator between the positive and negative charges in the cloud and between the cloud and the ground. When the opposite charges builds up enough, this insulating capacity of the air breaks down and there is a rapid discharge of electricity that we know as lightning. The flash of lightning temporarily equalizes the charged regions in the atmosphere until the opposite charges build up again. 

Lightning can occur between opposite charges within the thunderstorm cloud (intra-cloud lightning) or between opposite charges in the cloud and on the ground (cloud-to-ground lightning).

Lightning is one of the oldest observed natural phenomena on earth. It can be seen in volcanic eruptions, extremely intense forest fires, surface nuclear detonations, heavy snowstorms, in large hurricanes, and obviously, thunderstorms.

What are cloud flashes?

A cloud flash is lightning that occurs inside the cloud, travels from one part of a cloud to another, or from the cloud to the air.

What is a “stepped leader?”

A stepped leader is a stream of weakly charged particles that flows from the cloud – it moves towards the ground, starting and stopping, and sometimes branching, trying to find the path of least resistance.

Is it possible to have thunder without lightning?

No, it is not possible to have thunder without lightning. 
Thunder is a direct result of lightning. However, it IS possible that you might see lightning and not hear the thunder because it was too far away. Sometimes this is called “heat lightning” because it occurs most often in the summer.

Is lightning always produced by a thunderstorm?

Thunderstorms always have lightning (thunder is caused by lightning, and you can't have a thunderstorm without thunder), but you can have lightning without a thunderstorm. Lightning can also be seen in volcanic eruptions, extremely intense forest fires, surface nuclear detonations, and in heavy snowstorms.

What causes thunder?

Thunder is caused by lightning. The bright light of the lightning flash caused by the return stroke mentioned above represents a great deal of energy. This energy heats the air in the channel to above 50,000 degrees F in only a few millionths of a second! The air that is now heated to such a high temperature had no time to expand, so it is now at a very high pressure. The high pressure air then expands outward into the surrounding air compressing it and causing a disturbance that propagates in all directions away from the stroke. The disturbance is a shock wave for the first 10 yards, after which it becomes an ordinary sound wave, or thunder. Thunder can seem like it goes on and on because each point along the channel produces a shock wave and sound wave.

What is dry lightning?

Dry lightning is lightning that occurs without rain nearby. The NOAA Storm Prediction Center routinely forecasts dry lightning because this kind is more likely to cause forest fires.

What is a “bolt from the blue”?

A “Bolt from the Blue” is a cloud-to-ground flash which typically comes out of the back side of the thunderstorm cloud, travels a relatively large distance in clear air away from the storm cloud, and then angles down and strikes the ground. These lightning flashes have been documented to travel more than 25 miles away from the thunderstorm cloud. They can be especially dangerous because they appear to come from clear blue sky.

A helmeted bicyclist experienced a lightning strike to the head under fair weather conditions with a cloudless sky. It was determined that the bolt probably originated in a thunderstorm that was about 16km away and obscured by mountains. 

Lightning strikes the ground approximately 25 million times each year in the U.S. According to the NWS, the chance of an individual in the U.S. being killed or injured during a given year is one in 240,000. Assuming an average life-span of 80 years, a person's odds over their lifetime becomes one in 3000. Assuming the average person has ten family members and others with whom they are close, then the chances are one in 300 that a lightning strike will closely affect a person during their lifetime.

Does lightning always strike the tallest object?

Never say always! Lightning USUALLY strikes the tallest object. It makes sense that the tallest object is most attractive, because it is the easiest path for the lightning to take.

What type of electricity is lightning?

Lightning is an electrostatic discharge accompanied by the emission of visible light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation.

How many volts and watts are in lightning?

Lightning can have 100 million to 1 billion volts, and contains billions of watts.

Why are positive lightning bolts deemed more dangerous than the more common negatively charged bolts?

Positive lightning is often considered more dangerous because its electrical field is stronger (forming at the top of the storm), the flash duration is typically longer, and its peak charge can be much greater than a negative strike. Plus, positively charged lightning can occur near the edge of a cloud or strike more than 10 miles away – when people aren't aware of the danger.

Does lightning strike from the sky down, or the ground up?

The answer is both. Cloud-to-ground lightning comes from the sky down, but the part you see comes from the ground up. A typical cloud-to-ground flash lowers a path of negative electricity (that we cannot see) towards the ground in a series of spurts. Objects on the ground generally have a positive charge. 

Since opposites attract, an upward streamer is sent out from the object about to be struck. When these two paths meet, a return stroke zips back up to the sky. It is the return stroke that produces the visible flash, but it all happens so fast - in about one-millionth of a second - so the human eye doesn't see the actual formation of the stroke.

How hot can lightning make the air?

Energy from lightning heats the air anywhere from 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit to up to 60,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

What causes lightning to be colored rather than the usual white or blue?

Lightning can appear to be many different colors depending on what the light travels through to get to your eyes. In snowstorms, where it is somewhat rare, pink and green are often described as colors of lightning. Haze, dust, moisture, raindrops and any other particles in the atmosphere will affect the color by absorbing or diffracting a portion of the white light of lightning.

How does the Earth benefit from lightning?

The earth benefits from lightning in several ways. First, lightning helps the Earth maintain electrical balance. The Earth is recharged by thunderstorms. The Earth's surface and the atmosphere conduct electricity easily—the Earth is charged negatively and the atmosphere, positively. There is always a steady current of electrons flowing upwards from the entire surface of the Earth. Thunderstorms help transfer the negative charges back to Earth (lightning is generally negatively charged). Without thunderstorms and lightning, the earth-atmosphere electrical balance would disappear in 5 minutes. Lightning also makes ozone-producing chemicals.

What happens to the ground when lightning strikes it?

What tends to happen when lightning strikes ground is that it fuses dirt and clays in to silicas. The result is often a glassy rock (called a fulgurite) in the shape of a convoluted tube. Fulgurite has been found all over the world, but is relatively rare. The color depends on the minerals in the sand that was struck.The shape in the ground is the shape of the path the lightning current followed in the ground. There is often damage to grasses along this path too. 

Lightning traveling down a tree trunk turns water to steam. If it gets under the bark into the surface moisture of the wood, the rapidly expanding steam can blast pieces of bark from the tree, and the wood along the path is often killed.

Can lightning strike the same place twice?

Lightning does hit the same spot (or almost the same spot) more than once, contrary to folk wisdom. It could be simply a statistical fluke (i.e., with all the lightning that occurs, eventually lightning will strike somewhere near a previous lightning strike within a short period of time). It could also be that something about the site makes it somewhat more likely to be struck. Typically, when lightning strikes something on the ground, the object that is struck sends a faint channel upward that joins the downward developing flash and creates the connection to the ground. Taller objects are more likely than shorter objects to produce the upward channel. But it is also possible that something that locally affects the ability of the ground to conduct electricity (such as the salt or moisture content of the ground at the time, the presence or absence of rock, standing water, pipes or other metal objects in the ground), the terrain shape, the shape of leaves or twigs, or something else might make a particular location more likely than another nearby location to be struck.

When and where does lightning most frequently strike?

Lightning comes from a parent cumulonimbus cloud. These thunderstorm clouds are formed wherever there is enough upward motion, instability in the vertical, and moisture to produce a deep cloud that reaches up to levels somewhat colder than freezing.

These conditions are most often met in summer. In general, the US mainland has a decreasing amount of lightning toward the northwest. Over the entire year, the highest frequency of cloud-to-ground lightning is in Florida between Tampa and Orlando. This is due to the presence, on many days during the year, of a large moisture content in the atmosphere at low levels (below 5,000 feet), as well as high surface temperatures that produce strong sea breezes along the Florida coasts. The western mountains of the US also produce strong upward motions and contribute to frequent cloud-to-ground lightning. There are also high frequencies along the Gulf of Mexico coast, the Atlantic coast in the southeast US, and inland from the Gulf. Regions along the Pacific west coast have the least cloud-to-ground lightning.

Does lightning happen during the winter?

Lightning occurs less frequently in the winter because there is not as much instability and moisture in the atmosphere as there is in the summer. These two ingredients work together to make convective storms that can produce lightning. Without instability and moisture, strong thunderstorms are unlikely.

During the winter, the land surface is cooler because there is not as much heating by the sun to warm it up. Without warm surface temperatures, the near-surface air wouldn't rise in the atmosphere very far. Thus, the kinds of deep (8-15 km deep) thunderstorms that develop in the summertime wouldn't develop.

Warm air holds more water vapor. And, when water vapor condenses into liquid water cloud drops, latent heat is released which fuels the thunderstorm. So, warm, moist air near the surface (and the proper conditions aloft to give you lots of instability) can result in deep convection, which may produce lightning discharges.

Clouds become electrified when strong updrafts (fueled by the instability and moisture) bring supercooled liquid water drops and ice crystals at temperatures less than freezing (0 deg C) together. In this environment, interactions between the ice crystals and supercooled water droplets produce electric charges. The exact mechanisms by which this charging happens remain unknown. The electrical charges build up until they are strong enough to overcome the resistance of the surrounding air. The breakdown of the electric fields produced by these charges is the lightning bolt.

What is thundersnow?

Although thunderstorms are less common in the winter, sometimes lightning can occur within snowstorms. Called thundersnow, relatively strong instability and abundant moisture may be found above the surface, such as above a warm front, rather than at the surface where it may be below freezing. Thundersnow is sometimes observed downstream of the Great Salt Lake and the Great Lakes during lake-effect snowstorms, too.

How many flashes a year are there?

Over the contiguous 48 states, an average of 20,000,000 cloud-to-ground flashes have been detected every year since the lightning detection network covered all of the continental US in 1989. In addition, about half of all flashes have more than one ground strike point, so at least 30 million points on the ground are struck on the average each year in the US. Besides cloud-to-ground flashes, there are roughly 5 to 10 times as many cloud flashes as there are ground flashes.

Cloud-to-ground lightning can kill or injure people by direct or indirect means. The lightning current can branch off to a person from a tree, fence, pole, or other tall object. It is not known if all people are killed who are directly struck by the flash itself. In addition, flashes may conduct their current through the ground to a person after the flash strikes a nearby tree, antenna, or other tall object. The current also may travel through power or telephone lines, or plumbing pipes to a person who is in contact with an electric appliance, telephone, or plumbing fixture.

Similarly, objects can be directly struck and this impact may result in an explosion, burn, or total destruction. Or, the damage may be indirect when the current passes through or near it. Sometimes, current may enter a building and transfer through wires or plumbing and damage everything in its path. Similarly, in urban areas, it may strike a pole or tree and the current then travels to several nearby houses and other structures and enter them through wiring or plumbing.

How can I stay safe from lightning?

NOAA's National Weather Service is an excellent source for information on indoor and outdoor lightning safety and lightning risks.

What are the odds of being struck by lightning?

The odds of being struck in your lifetime (estimated to be 80 years) are 1 in 3000.