What is lightning?
Sometimes lightning gets up so that you can think of some special origin of it. Here are some historical facts. July 27, 1691 lightning killed the reapers peacefully eating breakfast under an oak tree. When they tried to touch the dead, they fell to pieces; June 29, 1869 in the city of Ariege, lightning strikes a local mayor, who does not kill, but strips naked and throws all his torn clothes around. Sometimes lightning shaved or destroyed the hair of the victims. In the oaks, lightning strikes especially often. Do not stand during a thunderstorm under the trees, especially under the oaks!
Lightnings left on the victim's body and prints of nearby objects. In March 1867, lightning struck a tree, under which three children hid. The children remained alive, but on the body of one of them appeared an exact, to the smallest detail, an image of a tree!
And along with these "jeweler" works, lightnings perform truly monstrous destruction - they turn into ruins of the house, tear out the trees and split the two ships.
What is lightning? In a thundercloud, the water is in the form of ice crystals. These crystals rub against each other, generating static electricity. In this case, the potential of the generated electric charge is estimated on average about 5*107 B, and the current strength is about 200000 A. It is known that the power in watts is the product of the potential in volts per current in amperes, and the average power is half the maximum. We get 5*109 kW. If we take into account the maximum parameters-the length of the lightning above 50 km, the voltage in 1*109 B, and the current strength of 500000 A, then the power will already be 2,5*1011 kW. This capacity is commensurate with the power of the world's energy sector. But is there a lot of energy in the lightning?
To answer, you need to know the lifetime of lightning. Did you notice that during a flash of lightning, all moving objects - both cars and pedestrians seem to be still? This is because the spark discharge, which is lightning, is very fast, an average of about 0,001 seconds. Let's multiply the power of lightning for this time and get its energy. It will be 1400 kWh for the average lightning. This is approximately the annual electricity consumption for the average apartment. Well, a lightning-record holder will pull on all 70000 kWh.
What are lightning. Most lightnings occur between the cloud and the earth's surface, but there are lightnings that appear between the clouds. All these lightning are usually called linear. There is a rather unusual kind of lightning - the so-called ribbon zipper. In this case, a picture is observed, as if several almost identical linear lightnings shifted relative to each other. It occurs when a strong wind blows perpendicular to the lightning channel, which shifts the channel per meter and more per second. In this case, the discharge pulses are spatially displaced with respect to each other - ribbon lightning arises.
Linear lightning is a series of pulses that quickly follow each other. Each pulse is the breakdown of the air gap between the cloud and the earth, occurring as a spark discharge. In the development of the first (initial) pulse, there are two stages: first a discharge channel is formed between the cloud and the earth, and then the main current pulse rapidly passes through the formed channel.
There is another kind of lightning, differing in its mystery. This is the so-called ball lightning. Until now, the nature of this lightning is not fully understood.
