The air near a lightning strike is heated to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is hotter than the surface of the sun. Rapid heating and cooling of air near the lightning channel causes a shock wave that results in thunder. Thunder from a nearby lightning strike will have a very sharp crack or loud bang.
This rapid expansion and contraction creates the sound wave that we hear as thunder. Although a lightning discharge usually strikes just one spot on the ground, it travels many miles through the air. When you listen to thunder, you’ll first hear the thunder created by that portion of the lightning channel that is nearest you.
This is two major problems and thunder strikes will kill peoples, because of we have electrons in our body and thunderbolt/thunder lightning having postive charge and when you’re standing near tree, our body attracts charges of tree when raining and thunder is attacting with positive charge.
One of the next things we wondered was, how far can lightning strike from a thunderstorm?
Fact: Lightning often strikes more than three miles from the thunderstorm, far outside the rain or even the thunderstorm cloud. Though infrequent, “bolts from the blue” have been known to strike areas as distant as 10 miles from their thunderstorm origins, where the skies appear clear. Fact: True, being in a car will likely protect you.
What is lightning most likely to strike?
Lightning tends to strike more often over land masses than over oceans, and it is more frequently seen in the tropics, where two-thirds of the electrical storms happen.
A frequent question we ran across in our research was “Where does lightning often strike?”.
Only about 25 percent of lightning strikes are cloud-to-ground. The rest are either cloud-to-cloud or intracloud. [more information] Another lightning hot spot is in the Himalayas where the extreme local topography forces the convergence of air masses from the Indian Ocean. And where does lightning strike most frequently?
The electric field “looks” for a doorknob., and sort of. It looks for the closest and easiest path to release its charge. Often lightning occurs between clouds or inside a cloud. But the lightning we usually care about most is the lightning that goes from clouds to ground —because that’s us!
Signs of an Immediate Strike. Hair standing on end. Tingling skinA metallic taste in your mouth. The smell of chlorine (this is ozone, which is produced when nitrogen oxides from lightning interact with other chemicals and sunlight)Sweaty palmsA vibrating, buzzing, or crackling sound coming from metal objects around you.
How does lightning strike the ground?
As the negative charge gets close to the ground, a positive charge, called a streamer, reaches up to meet the negative charge. The channels connect and we see the lightning stroke. We may see several strokes using the same path, giving the lightning bolt a flickering appearance, before the electrical discharge is complete.
One article claimed that 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.
Where does Lightning come from, the ground or the sky?
Lightning originates in the sky, but the part of the cloud-to-ground lightning visible to the human eye comes from the positive electrical charge that responds to the invisible negative electrical charge sent from the clouds. Lightning helps the ground and the atmosphere exchange and balance positive and negative energy.
Another answer was Lightning can come from the ground as well as clouds Credit: Uk, newsin Pictures In most cases there is cloud-to-ground lightning but what you actually see comes from the ground up. The flash lowers a path of negative electricity, that can’t be seen with the human eye, towards the ground in a series of spurts.