es cool and denser nighttime air slides in underneath of it. Clouds of water droplets, generally supercooled to around –15 C at a height of 6 km condense around dust particles in the air until a critical density is reached. At this point it begins to rain” (The Physics 1).
There are two types of lightning, cloud-to-ground discharges and intracloud. Most of the lightning we see is cloud-to-ground discharges. The discharges are created by the movement of air around the clouds which cause a charge separation. The energy that had been building up is released in the lightning stroke we see hit the earth. The stroke is actually a series of steps measuring 1 ( sec steps of length of about 50 m. (Valdivia 2). Before these stepped discharges strike the earth another discharge which has an opposite charge comes from the ground. When these two discharges come together they short the circuit which creates a return stroke. This return stroke lowers the charge because it moves upward along the ionized channel. The speed of this return stroke is a fraction of the speed of light and the cloud-to-ground discharge functions as a vertical electric dipole antenna capable of radiating in a horizontal direction, “Most of the initial energy stored in the separated charge is dissipated in the form of heat and radio waves. In fact only a very small amount of energy is accessible, or released, at the ground in the case of a cloud-to-ground stroke. Lightning generates two types of electric fields: static electric fields are produce
...