The sound of thunder should serve as a warning to anyone outside that they are within striking distance of the storm and need to get to a safe place immediately! Thunder is created when lightning passes through the air. The lightning discharge heats the air rapidly and causes it to expand. The temperature of the air in the lightning channel may reach as high as 50, degrees Fahrenheit, 5 times hotter than the surface of the sun.
Immediately after the flash, the air cools and contracts quickly. The difference between thunder and lightning still confuses many people. In fact, there are some who think that both are exactly the same thing. In addition, there are also misleading uses of thunder in popular media and literature. The Norse god of thunder Thor, for example, is portrayed to have the power over lighting yet not a hint of thunder-based prowess. Thunder is the noise that is produced by and that follows lightning.
It is characterized by a loud, rolling noise that seems to sweep across the sky. The sound is somewhat like successive sonic booms coming from planes passing by and is distinct and recognizable. Lightning is widely used to represent thunder. This is because thunder is not visually perceptible, only aurally. This extreme heating causes the air to expand explosively fast.
The expansion creates a shock wave that turns into a booming sound wave, known as thunder. As ice crystals high within a thunderstorm cloud flow up and down in the turbulent air, they crash into each other.
Small negatively charged particles called electrons are knocked off some ice and added to other ice as they crash past each other. The top of the cloud becomes positively charged while the base of the cloud becomes negatively charged. Once the negative charge at the bottom of the cloud gets large enough, a flow of negative charge called a stepped leader rushes toward the Earth.
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! As the storm moves over the ground, the strong negative charge in the cloud attracts positive charges in the ground.
These positive charges move up into the tallest objects like trees, telephone poles, and houses. A "stepped leader" of negative charge descends from the cloud seeking out a path toward the ground. Although this phase of a lightning strike is too rapid for human eyes, this slow-motion video shows it happening.
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.
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