This electrical potential creates a powerful electric field, a bit like the contour lines on a map, which stretches from the bottom of the cloud to the ground (Earth). It's possible that the solar wind, a million mile an hour maelstrom of cosmic radiation streaming out of the sun, may help in this sorting process.īefore long the cloud accumulates a massive potential difference measured in millions of volts. For reasons that scientists don't fully understand, the smaller particles pick up a positive charge, and the larger particles pick up a negative charge.Īs these hydrometeors jostle about, updrafts push the smaller positively-charged particles towards the top of the cloud, leaving the negative charges concentrated at the bottom. It's produced when friction between tiny water and ice particles in clouds, called "hydrometeors", generates static electricity. Franklin flew a kite into a thundercloud and was rewarded with a stream of sparks flowing from the bottom of the kite string.įranklin's experiment worked because lightning is a multi-million volt electrical discharge between one cloud and another, or between a cloud and the Earth. Scottish scientist Robert Symmer had this off to a fine art and earned the dubious title of "the barefoot philosopher" because he was always removing his silk socks and rubbing them on things to produce sparks.īut it was a daring experiment by Benjamin Franklin in 1752, and one which he was lucky to survive, that proved it once and for all. Scientists began to suspect that lightning must be a form of electricity as early as the 1700s because it looked similar to the sparks you could produce by rubbing certain materials together. Thats over 8 million lightning bolts every day. But how do clouds come by all this energy, and couldn't we put it to good use?įigure 1: At any time there are over 2,000 thunderstorms occurring worldwide, each producing over a 100 lightning strikes a second. That's over 8 million lightning bolts every day unleashing the power of 2 million tons of TNT.
At any one time, all around the world, there are 2,000 thunderstorms happening, producing over a 100 lightning strikes a second.
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