Weather

Lightning !!

 LIGHTNING CAN FRY YOU! -- "You've got to be kidding me !"

 Old Mr. Ben Franklin must have been crazy!  (*Note: A picture of Ben flying a kite can be seen in our kids section, under flying a kite !*) Who would fly a kite in a lightning storm?   While he discovered electricity, he also discovered something else, almost by accident:  Lightning can fry you!  Luckily for our old friend Mr. Ben he lived to grow older and wiser with age.

 More than 100 people in the United States each year are not so licky.  Lightning ]is nothing to fool around with.  Lightning is the the number two weather realted killed around, after floods.  Lightning also kills many animals and is a chief cause of many house and forest fires.

 
 EXACTLY WHAT IS LIGHTNING?

• LIGHTNING IS ELECTRICITY -   If you were to think of a thunderstorn as a giant battery, the bottoms of the storm clouds build up the negative charges.  The tops of the storm clouds build up the positive charges, as does the ground.   In a storm, the positive and the negative poles are constantly trying to balance each other.  Lightning flashes between opposite poles between a cloud and between clouds and the ground.  
  
•  GROUND LIGHTNING IS THE KILLER-  A negative charge descends from the sky to meet a positive charge rising from the ground ( or from a building or a tree or a person, or another object which is higher than it's surroundings).  When the two charges meet: ZAP!
  
•  LIGHTNING IS EXTREMELY FAST! - Lightning bolts travel at up to 60,000 miles per second.  Think about it.  This is more than one billion miles per hour!
  
•  LIGHTNING IS EXTREMELY HOT! - Lightning bolts can reach up to a sizzling 50,000 degrees, with a charge of up to a billion volts!  These bolts can produce so much heat that the air can explode into rumbling shock waves.  This is thunder!
  
•  LIGHTNING BOLTS LOVE FRIENDS! - A lightning bolt is rarely alone.  A highly charged cloud can continue to discharge elecrticity until it is in balance with the ground.
  
•  WHY DOES LIGHTNING LOOK LIKE ZIG ZAGS? - More than half of lightning occurs within a specific cloud which looks like flashes of light instead of zigzagging bolts.  Other  bolts of lightning trave from cloud to cloud. When they do this they create bolts that almost look sideways, and then others simply shoot out into the air.  Ball lighning, which is very rare, is a very rounded form which often shoots across the sky.

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