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Distant lightning near Louisville, Kentucky. Heat lightning (not to be confused with dry thunderstorms, which are also often called dry lightning) is a misnomer [1] used for the faint flashes of lightning on the horizon or other clouds from distant thunderstorms that do not appear to have accompanying sounds of thunder.
Pyrocumulonimbus are cumuliform clouds that can form over a large fire and that are particularly dry. [10] When the higher levels of the atmosphere are cooler, and the surface is thus warmed to extreme temperatures due to a wildfire, volcano, or other event, convection will occur, and produce clouds and lightning.
Lightning is a natural phenomenon, more specifically an atmospheric electrical phenomenon. It consists of electrostatic discharges occurring through the atmosphere between two electrically charged regions, either both existing within the atmosphere or one within the atmosphere and one on the ground, with these regions then becoming partially or wholly electrically neutralized.
[10] [11] Positive clear-air strikes can occur in highly sheared environments where the upper positive charge region becomes horizontally displaced from the precipitation area. [12] Cloud-to-air lightning is a lightning flash in which one end of a bidirectional leader exits the cloud, but does not result in a ground flash. Such flashes can ...
About 25% of all lightning events worldwide are strikes between the atmosphere and earth-bound objects. Most are intracloud (IC) lightning and cloud-to-cloud (CC), where discharges only occur high in the atmosphere. [1] [2] Lightning strikes the average commercial aircraft at least once a year, but modern engineering and design means this is ...
Thundersnow is most likely to occur during heavy snowfall, which can make it harder for ground observers to witness. However, while the snow sometimes muffles the thunder, the lightning can more ...
Global map of lightning frequency--strikes/km 2 /yr. The high lightning areas are on land located in the tropics. Areas with almost no lightning are the Arctic and Antarctic, closely followed by the oceans which have only 0.1 to 1 strikes/km 2 /yr. The map on the right shows that lightning is not distributed evenly around the planet. [5]
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