Lightning

Lightning Facts

Florida is the lightning capital of the United States.

Lightning bolts travel at speeds of up to 60,000 miles per second.

A single lightning bolt travels through twisted paths in the air that can be as wide as one of your fingers or from six to ten miles.

A flash of lightning is brighter than 10,000,000 100-watt light bulbs.

A flash of lightning can pulse as much power as there is in all the power plants in the United States in that split second.

A flash of lightning could power a light bulb for a month.

Trees sometimes can survive direct hits from lightning because the electricity passes over their wet surface and go into the ground.

10% of all people struck by lightning were in Florida at the time.

In March of 1991, a single six hour storm stretching over Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri caused more than 15,000 lightning strikes. During the storm the skies were blazed with almost constant lightning.

Lightning can be made in a laboratory by an instrument called a Van de Graaff static electricity generator which could generate million of volts of artificial lightning from a metal sphere mounted at the top of an insulated column.

About 71.4286% of all people struck by lightning still survive.

Temperatures in the path of a lightning bolt can reach as high as 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

HOW LIGHTNING FORMS

Ice crystals and raindrops move violently in storm clouds.

Because of the motion, electric charges build up at the bottom of a cloud. An opposite electric charge builds up in the ground just under the cloud.

Small streamers of sparks called stepped leaders begin to shoot downward in 50-yard leaps, starting in the cloud.

As the leaders approach the ground, they meet upward leaders from the ground. The upward leaders most likely come from high places like treetops and tall buildings.

When the two streamers meet, their paths form a channel and a lightning bolt is born. Even though this kind of lightning seems to shoot down from the clouds, what we actually see is the return stroke of electricity flashing upward from the ground.

KINDS OF LIGHTNING

Intracloud lightning - One of the main kinds of lightning and it is the most common one. It occurs when lightning arcs between oppositely charged centers within the same cloud.

Cloud-to-ground lightning - Also one of the main kinds of lightning. It is the most dangerous form of lightning and the kind we know most about.

Intercloud lightning - Another one of the main kinds of lightning. It occurs when lightning leaps across a gap of clear air between two different clouds.

Heat lightning - It occurs when it's hot.

Summer lightning - It occurs in the summer.

Sheet lightning - It seems to come in flat waves.

Ribbon lightning - It looks like streamers flashing through the sky.

Silent lightning - It appears without a sound because it is so far away.

Colored lightning - It seems to flash red or blue.

Ball lightning - It is a bright round spark that seems to float in the air.

Elves - In the summer of 1995 this form of lightning was discovered by scientists. Elves are very bright, short flashes of lightning high above the clouds at the very edge of space. They last for less than a thousandth of a second. Their color is unknown but is thought to be green.

Jets - Another recently discovered high-altitude lightning. Jets are fast-moving fountains or sprays of blue light that burst upward from the top of storm clouds to an altitude of about twenty miles above the clouds. Pilots have reported seeing columns of blue or green light above thunderheads for years, but have only recently been videotaped.

Sprites - A recently discovered kind of lightning. One of the first true-color pictures of a red sprite was photographed at an altitude of sixty miles over a thunderstorm in the Midwest in July of 1994.


Fulgurites - Lightning sometimes strikes the ground and tunnels downward into the ground. The intense heat of the electricity causes the sand particles to come togehter of the shape of the bolt's path. The resulting tubular crust is called a fulgurite, after the Latin word for lightning. Some fulgurites are longer than ten feet.

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