Lightning

Lightning is a natural phenomenon that is dramatic, often beautiful, and yet deadly and dangerous at the same time. A bolt of lightning involves the rapid discharge of a massive amount of electrical energy producing both the bright flash of light and the sound of thunder. There are a number of different kinds of lightning produced by different conditions, and new information on lightning is discovered all the time. By its nature, lightning is an ephemeral phenomenon, making it difficult to study under all conditions and explaining why new types of lightning have been found as man makes his way higher and more often into different regions of the upper atmosphere. Lightning is an extremely common natural phenomenon. Since Benjamin Franklin demonstrated the electrical nature of the lightning bolt, lightning has been subjected to many scientific studies. Although Franklin(s experimental success demonstrated that rain clouds are electrified and that lightning is a gigantic electrical discharge, lightning(s exact origins and the mechanism by which rain clouds are electrified have never been completely elucidated.

Although lightning has also been observed to occur during earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, nuclear test explosions, and out of a clear sky, the most usual manifestation of lightning is during a thunderstorm. Thunderstorms form in atmosphere that contains cold dense air at higher altitudes and warm, moist air at lower levels. The typical thunderstorm is between 8

Related Essays

Lightning .... though man continually attempts to understand the complex physics associated with cloud-to-ground and cloud-to-cloud (or intracloud) lightning, its existence .... (1834 7 )

Lightning is a natural phenomenon Lightning is a natural phenomenon that is dramatic, often beautiful, and yet deadly and dangerous at the same time. A bolt of lightning .... (2115 8 )

Thunderstorms Rattling the earth with sharp, explosive sounds of thunder, and lighting up the sky with electric bolts of lightning. As Mark Twain .... (1333 5 )

Weather Conditions and Aircraft Accidents Aircraft can become directly impacted by weather when they are struck by lightning in storms, blown off course, incur malfunctions due to the icing up of .... (2442 10 )

Nature in 6 Poems .... Bishop takes as her controlling image the events of a violent rainy-season lightning storm and the effects that it exerts on the smaller creatures of nature. .... (2333 9 )

equent than either IC or CG lightning, but all discharges other than CG are often combined under the general term "cloud discharges" (Uman and Krider 458). There are two main theories to explain the electrification of thunderclouds--precipitation and convection. The first theory is based on the observation that the larger water drops in a garden sprinkler drop quickly, whereas the mist of small water particles remains suspended in the air to be blown away by the wind. Proponents of this hypothesis assume that raindrops, hailstones, and graupel particles (millimeter-to-centimeter-size ice pellets) in the thundercloud are pulled downward by gravity past the smaller water droplets and ice crystals. In the collisions between them, negative charge is transferred to the precipitation particles and positive charge to the mist (Williams 89). According to the convection model, the relative motion between ice crystals and graupel particles causes large-scale charge separation. Convection does in fact explain the upper (screening layer( of negative charges. Powerful updrafts are not only consistent with electrification, but necessary for it to occur. These updrafts maintain a supply of supercooled water droplets high in the cloud, a

Category: Science - L