Causes of intercloud lightning

Storm clouds usually produce electric charges, with yin electricity at the bottom and yang electricity at the top, and also a positive charge on the ground, which follows the clouds like a shadow. The yang and yin charges attract each other, but air is not a good conductor. Yang electricity rushes to the tops of trees, hills, tall buildings, and even the human body, trying to meet the clouds with yin electricity; The catacles of the cathode branch extend downward, and the further down they reach, the closer they get to the ground.

Finally, the yin and yang charges finally overcame the barrier of air and connected. A huge electric current surged from the ground to the clouds along a conductive airway, producing a bright and dazzling flash. The length of a lightning bolt may be only a few hundred kilometers, but it can be several thousand meters long.

The temperature of lightning varies from 17,000 degrees Celsius to 28,000 degrees Celsius, which is equal to 3.5 times the surface temperature of the sun. The extreme heat of the lightning caused the air to expand violently along its path. The air moves quickly, so waves are formed and sound is made.

The lightning was so close that all you heard was a sharp crackling sound; If it's a long distance, it's a rumble that is heard. You can turn on the stopwatch when you see lightning, stop it when you hear thunder, and divide it by 3 to get a sense of how many meters away you are.

Cloud flash is a phenomenon of electrical discharge between clouds due to different charges in different parts of the same cloud. Cloud lightning includes intra-cloud lightning, intercloud lightning (lightning between two clouds), and sky lightning (lightning in the atmosphere outside the cloud and clouds).

Because the cloud flash can form a number of high-temperature and high-heat discharge channels in the atmosphere, the instantaneous strong current generated by the lightning can move back and forth quickly in this discharge circuit, which is higher than the frequency of the conventional "cloud-to-ground lightning (ground flash)", so it forms a strobe trend.

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In fact, there is no difference between cloud flash and ground flash in essence, the charge distribution in the cloud is positive and negative, and in the end it is just to find a channel to release the charge.

According to the spatial location of its occurrence, lightning can be divided into intra-cloud lightning, inter-cloud lightning (cloud lightning), cloud-ground lightning (ground lightning), etc. Among them, ground lightning is divided into landing mines and direct lightning strikes, which are the main research objects of lightning protection.

Formation of clouds.

If we know evaporation, sublimation, condensation, and condensation, it is easy for us to understand how clouds are formed. The water in the ocean, lakes, plant surfaces, and soil evaporates all the time, turning into water vapor and entering the atmosphere. Moist air containing water vapor rises upwards for some reason.

During the ascent process, as the surrounding air becomes thinner and thinner, the air pressure becomes lower and lower, and the volume of the rising air expands. When it expands, it dissipates its own heat, so the temperature of the rising air decreases. When the temperature decreases, the ability to contain water vapor becomes smaller and smaller, the saturated water vapor pressure decreases, the water vapor in the rising air quickly reaches a saturated state, and the temperature decreases again, and the excess water vapor attaches to the condensation nucleus suspended in the air and becomes small water droplets.

If the temperature is lower than 0, the excess water vapor condenses into ice crystals or supercooled water droplets. They are gathered together, supported by updrafts, and float in the air as clouds that we can see.

What's the deal with lightning? It is the static electricity generated when the clouds moving high in the air rub against each other, and when the static electricity accumulates in large quantities, it discharges each other, thus forming the lightning that we see cutting through the sky.

Thunder is actually the vibration that occurs when lightning strikes through the air.

A lightning bolt is usually hundreds to thousands of meters long, so the time it takes for the sound of the lightning to reach our ears when it penetrates the air will be a few seconds or more than a dozen seconds (the speed of sound in the air is 340 m s). In addition, thunder is reflected back and forth between clouds, so when a lightning bolt passes, we hear thunder, and the thunder "rumbles" for a long time.