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Did
you know you're actually more likely to be struck by lightning than
you are of scooping the jackpot in the National Lottery this weekend.
Yet how often have you thought that this might just be your lucky
weekend?
Here
are some other things you might not know about thunder and lightning:
Lightning
occurs when tiny ice crystals collide with larger ice crystals within
a cumulonimbus cloud. The positively charged ice crystals are lighter
than the negatively charged pellets and they are carried high up
into the cloud.
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At
any one moment there are about 1800 thunderstorms around the
world with 100 lightning strikes per second. Java has more
thunderstorms than anywhere else - around 220 days of thunder
each year.
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| Richard
Angwin |
The
charge separation builds up and up until in
about 0.2 of a second there is a discharge of about one and a half
million volts.
The
air surrounding the lightning is heated to about 30,000 degrees
Celsius. This causes the air to expand, producing a massive sound
wave, or thunder.
Whilst
light travels at 300,000 kilometres per second, sound is much slower
at around 1200 kilometres per hour. So when you see the flash of
lightning, count. Every three seconds represent one kilometre distance
from the storm.
Some
people are terrified of lightning - that is known as keraunophobia,
whilst a fear of thunder is brontophobia.
It
would not be surprising if US Park Ranger Roy Sullivan suffered
from those phobias. He was struck by lightning a total of seven
times before his death in 1983.
At
any one moment there are about 1800 thunderstorms around the world
with 100 lightning strikes per second. Java has more thunderstorms
than anywhere else - around 220 days of thunder each year.
We
are lucky here in the West County. We only get 5 to 10 days of thunder
and lightning per year. So all you keraunophobes and brontophobes
take heart, lightning is a fairly rare event.
by
Richard Angwin
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