What is thunder

Lightning is a very strong jolt of electricity, creating glowing gas particles called plasma that light up the night sky. UCAR Lightning is the most spectacular element of a thunderstorm. In fact it is how thunderstorms got their name. But wait a minute, what does thunder have to do with lightning? Well, lightning causes thunder. Lightning is a discharge of electricity. A single stroke of lightning can heat the air around it to 30,000°C (54,000°F)! 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. What's Happening Within the Cloud? As ice crystals high within a thunderstorm flow up and down in the turbulent air, they crash into each other. Small negatively charged particles called electrons are knocked off some ice crystals and added to other ice crystals as they crash past each other. This separates the positive (+) and negative (-) charges of the cloud. The top of the cloud becomes positively charged with particles called protons, while the base of the cloud becomes negatively charged. How Is a Lightning Bolt Formed? Because opposites attract, the negative charge at the bottom of the storm cloud wants to link up with the ground’s positive charge. 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. The positive charges at the ground are attracted to the stepped leader, so posi...

Dark clouds have gathered, the wind has picked up and the air feels a little cooler. It looks like a storm is on the way. For the most part, thunderstorms occur during the warmer seasons. We've all experienced a slight feeling of unease at an approaching storm, yet at the same time we're fascinated by one of nature's most impressive displays. Thunder and lightning are natural phenomena and have nothing at all to do with Zeus, as the ancient Greeks thought. As early as 1752, Benjamin Franklin discovered that lightning was caused by powerful electrical discharges in the clouds. Thunderstorms are caused by small electrically-charged particles. It's quite simple really. Water in clouds moves upwards. As it does so, it cools and freezes. As these ice particles fall back down they make contact with water droplets lower down in the cloud and this results in a charge separation. Within the cloud, two poles form, each with a different electrical charge. On the ground, too, there are differences in electrical charges. Nature, though, is always striving to balance out these differences in electrical charges. That means that charged particles will always flow in the direction where there are less particles of the same charge. The result is a lightning bolt. At first, there is a bolt which is invisible to our eyes. At the same time, an excess of positively charged particles builds up on the ground, seen here in green. When the invisible lightning bolt gets close enough to the ground, t...

Richard Brill, a professor at Honolulu Community College, explains: Thunder is caused by lightning, which is essentially a stream of electrons flowing between or within clouds, or between a cloud and the ground. The air surrounding the electron stream is heated to as hot as 50,000 degrees Farhenheit, which is three times hotter than the surface of the sun. As the superheated air cools it produces a resonating tube of partial vacuum surrounding the lightning's path. The nearby air rapidly expands and contracts. This causes the column to vibrate like a tubular drum head and produces a tremendous crack. As the vibrations gradually die out, the sound echoes and reverberates, generating the rumbling we call thunder. We can hear the thundering booms 10 miles or more distant from the lightning that caused it. THUNDER STORMS produce lightning, which creates the sound we call thunder. When the lightning is within sight, however, we see it first because the speed of sound in air is considerably slower that that of the electron flow. Thus, the sound behaves more like a shock wave than an ordinary sound wave. The shock wave follows the path of the electrons like a fist in a sock. The speed of sound is even more insignificant when compared to the speed of light. The light from the flash reaches us in a fraction of a second, whereas the sound lags along like a snail following an interplanetary rocket. The audiovisual spectacle of thunder and lightning is a combination of the dynamics of...

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A dog who is afraid of thunder has been filmed doing the only logical thing in the event of a thunderstorm: getting in his mom and dad's bed. Archie the Vizsla might be a physically imposing animal, but underneath that tough dog exterior, he's clearly something of a softie. His owner Becca regularly posts videos and pictures of his exploits to "POV: You're in your late 20s, married, no kids, and your dog is scared of thunder so he jumps in bed at midnight and you all watch TikToks together," an onscreen caption reads. Stock images of a dog sleeping with its female owner; and (inset) of a thunderstorm. A Vizsla who is afraid of thunder has been filmed getting in his mom and dad's bed. Boris Jovanovic/Jonathan Beckett/Getty Archie's fear of thunder isn't uncommon among dogs. In a 2017 study published in Scientific Reports, researchers analyzed the anxiety-related behaviors of 13,715 dogs stretching across 264 breeds. They found 72.5 percent of the dogs studied expressed anxiety-like behaviors. More specifically, of this number, 32 percent of the dogs with anxiety struggled with noise sensitivity. In fact, 26 percent struggled specifically with the sound of fireworks, which is a well-known issue for dog owners. While Archie's fear may differ slightly, it's perhaps understandable that he would want to be close to his human companions during these periods of stress. It certainly doesn't look like Becca or her husband are especially annoyed at The life 🥹 Archie's parents are not...