Phenomenon of lightning

GROUP 6
* KENNETH MARK BALANZA
* RAMIELLE BADILES
* CRISTOPHER BALAJADIA
* CHRISTIAN B. ORDILLOS

Lightning is terrifying, beautiful and confusing phenomenon

Lightning in ancient legends

For many years, people used to believe that lightning
is a holy event which is related to gods that punish
those people who disobey them. People believed that
Zeus is the god of lightning ,at that time the smartest
man used to believe in these myths.

ZeusGod of the Lightning!!!!

The first one to study this phenomenon

In the eighteenth century and after eleven centuries,
many scientists started to study the phenomenon of
lightning and the one who made the initiative was
professor Franklin who used his famous kite when
he connected it to a metal wire and sent it up between
the clouds, a strong spark was released when the
electricity moved through the wire when it touched the
ground!

Franklin is the first one who proved that

the lightning is an electric spark

1752

Simply, lightning is the meeting of

negative charges with positive charges

negative charges

positive charges

A historical fact

The knowledge about the lightning was rare till the end of
the twenty century when the scientists discovered the
digital camera as they became able to capture 1000 photo
per second which enabled them to understand some
secrets about the lightning but details still unknown!

The question is: where does the lightning happen ?

The lightning needs special kind of clouds

during the thunder storms

Lightning in numbers around the world

A satellite photo

There are 100 lightning strike per second .

There are 8 million lightning strike every day.

In America the lightning kills 100 person every year.

!Marvelous numbers

Temperature of the lightning beam is 30000 Celsius

so it is five times greater than the temperature on the
surface of sun!!

The volt per beam is: 1000 million volt.

Electricity is: 200 thousand ampere

A lightning flash at midnight

The above photo shows lightning flash at midnight , if you

exposed to that flash you may became a permanently or
temporally blind according to the distance between
you and the flash.

The scientists are studying the lightning.how?

The scientists are choosing a perfect cloud to study ,time
of the lightning flash and the time between each phase as
those scientists believe that the lightning flash differs
from a cloud to another according to how far it is from the
ground, amount of electrical charges in the cloud and on
the ground ,temperature ,wind speed and humidity.

An ideal cloud 3 kilometers far from the ground

? How does the lightning occur

The lightning occurs in phases

The scientists discovered that the lightning occurs in

two main phases which are the crossing phase and
the returning phase, and they captured photos for
these two phases and said with certainty that the
lightning descends from the cloud and returns again!!

The first phase

A negative charge
descends from the cloud
toward the ground in
part of a second.

The second phase

The positive charge on

the ground meets with
that negative charge.

The third phase

As a result, a strong electric
spark generates and goes
toward the cloud.

The fourth phase

Here we can see the
returned electric charge
and that is the lightning
beam, all of these four
phases happens in 25
Millisecond.

A millisecond is a thousandth (1/1,000) of a second

A simple drawing demonstrates the

Mechanism of lightning

s 0.001~

s 0.05~

Return
stroke
Tracer
Dart
Leader

Streamer

km/s 1000

km/s 000 100

Kinds of lightning

Cloud-to-Ground
This is the archetypal lightning bolt -- one that
arcs out of the sky and smites the ground with
a great, often flickering flash of light. Lightning
is the sudden release of built-up charge
stored in an electric field, though exactly what
triggers it remains a mystery

Cloud Discharge
This is lightning that occurs within a
thundercloud, between 2 thunderclouds,
or from a thundercloud to the air. Experts
think most cloud discharges take place
within an individual cloud, though few data
exist to confirm that belief. Cloud
discharges are certainly more common
than the cloud-to-ground variety: 10-ormore cloud flashes may occur before the
.first one that strikes the Earth

Blue Jet
Blue Jets' shoot upward from the tops of '
thunderclouds. This remoteness -- and the
fact that they last but a few hundred
milliseconds at most -- perhaps accounts
for why they were not discovered until
1994. They are the color of sapphires, are
cone-shaped in structure, and extend for
. many miles

Red Sprites
Red Sprites' occur above large'
thunderstorm systems and are generally
associated with larger positive cloud-toground flashes far below. They are most
luminous very high up in the atmosphere
between altitudes of about 25 and 55
. miles

Elves
Like celestial halos, elves are circles of light
that appear some 50 miles-or-more above
thunderstorms. Triggered by lightning
flashes far below, these ephemeral discs
spread out radially across the bottom of
the ionosphere in the briefest instant,
expanding up to hundreds-of-miles in
. diameter in less than a millisecond

Volcanic Lightning
Lightning-like discharges are sometimes
observed during volcanic eruptions with no
thunderstorm anywhere nearby. Hundreds
or even thousands of feet in length, these
bolts can flash to the ground or remain
entirely within the ash cloud above the
. volcano

Nuclear Lightning
Hydrogen-bomb explosions can generate
their own lightning. Ground-level
detonations -- like this 1952 test of an
experimental thermonuclear device on
Eniwetok in the South Pacific -- cause a
negative charge to be deposited in the
atmosphere, resulting in long discharges
. not produced by clouds

Triggered Lightning
Triggering lightning at will -- at a"
predetermined place and time -- is the old
Promethean dream which seems more
related to legend than to Science,"
lightning expert Pierre Hubert has written.
Yet the technique has taught scientists
much about lightning processes and
. effects

!THANK YOU