I love a good thunderstorm, especially one that develops on those hot, humid dog days of summer. The air is so humid that nobody feels like moving. While man and beast lethargically move about, the hot, sticky air rises, expands, and cools as it gets higher. Cooling water vapor condenses and forms a cloud. The process of condensation, however, releases heat, which can keep the inside of the cloud warm enough to keep it expanding and rising even higher – miles up. The condensed water drops begin to fall, but strong updrafts hold them aloft, carrying the warm air mass up through miles of troposphere, near its boundary with the stratosphere, which we call the tropopause – the layer in which strong jet stream blow. The jet stream stretches the massive cloud into a typical anvil shape that we recognize as a thunderhead or cumulonimbus. Static charges build up between the rising wet, negatively charged warm air and the sinking positively charged colder, drier air.
When the charge difference is sufficient, great bolts of lightning streak back and forth, helping to equalize the charge. Or the lightning discharge might strike between the negatively charged clouds and the positively charged ground. The heat of lightning causes air to expand at supersonic speeds. Like jets breaking the sound barrier’ we hear the sonic booms of mighty thunder that rattles the windows and pounds in your chest. Before the rain hits, you feel the cold downdraft of air from the clouds piled high above, and the trees start to bend back and forth as the wind picks up – then the big drops begin plopping all around, kicking up little clouds of dust. Quickly the rain intensifies into one of God’s sweetest gifts to humanity – moisture falling out of the clouds in abundance. Sweet, clean, cold, solar-distilled water pours down in torrents in a complicated process that happens many times every day all over the earth. Recent satellite data shows that on average, about 3 million lightning strikes occur each day.