These positive charges move up into the tallest objects like trees, telephone poles, and houses. Often lightning occurs between clouds or inside a cloud.īut the lightning we usually care about most is the lightning that goes from clouds to ground-because that's us!Īs the storm moves over the ground, the strong negative charge in the cloud attracts positive charges in the ground. It looks for the closest and easiest path to release its charge. The electric field "looks" for a doorknob. How does the lightning "know" where to discharge-or strike? When the strength of the charge overpowers the insulating properties of the atmosphere, Z-Z-Z-ZAP! Lightning happens. These electrical fields become incredibly strong, with the atmosphere acting as an insulator between them in the cloud. It's a little more complicated than that, but what results is a cloud with a negatively charged bottom and a positively charged top. Where the ice going down meets the water coming up, electrons are stripped off.
Meanwhile, downdrafts in the cloud push ice and hail down from the top of the cloud. Water droplets in the bottom part of the cloud are caught in the updrafts and lifted to great heights where the much colder atmosphere freezes them. Winds inside the cloud are very turbulent. Lightning begins as static charges in a rain cloud.
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