- 11 Secrets Behind Lightning Storms, Backed by Meteorologists - September 27, 2025
- Why Soil Health Is Crucial For Climate Resilience And Sustainable Farming - September 25, 2025
- The Ethics of Geoengineering: Should Humanity Hack the Climate? - September 24, 2025
Temperature Inside Lightning Channels Rivals the Sun’s Surface
When lightning strikes, it creates an incredibly hot plasma channel that reaches temperatures of approximately 30,000 degrees Celsius, which is roughly five times hotter than the surface of the sun. This extreme heat occurs in a fraction of a second, causing the surrounding air to expand explosively. This return stroke can have a temperature on the order of 30,000 degrees Celsius. This extreme heat rapidly expands the air around it, creating the shock wave that produces thunder.
The lightning bolt superheats the air channel so quickly that it creates a pressure wave traveling outward at supersonic speeds. Lightning can also cause the surrounding air to heat up to 27,700 degrees Celsius (almost 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit), often setting nearby objects on fire. This explains why lightning strikes frequently ignite fires and why thunder follows lightning – the sound is literally the air being ripped apart and crashing back together from the intense heat.
Lightning Strikes Earth About One Hundred Times Every Second
Cloud-to-ground bolts are common – about 100 strike Earth’s surface every second. This means that around the world, lightning is constantly occurring with incredible frequency. Every day, an average of around 8 million lightning strikes discharges over the earth, which is the equivalent of about 100 lightning bolts that strike the Earth’s surface every second.
More than 2,000 thunderstorms are active throughout the world at a given moment. With such constant electrical activity happening globally, it’s no wonder that lightning has fascinated humans throughout history. The sheer scale of this phenomenon demonstrates just how electrically active our planet’s atmosphere really is, with millions of electrical discharges happening daily across different regions of the world.
Positive Lightning is Over Four Times More Powerful Than Regular Lightning
Positive lightning is less common than negative lightning and on average makes up less than 5% of all lightning strikes. Positive lightning strikes tend to be much more intense than their negative counterparts. An average bolt of negative lightning creates an electric current of 30,000 amperes (30 kA), transferring a total 15 C (coulombs) of electric charge and 1 gigajoule of energy. Large bolts of positive lightning can create up to 120 kA and transfer 350 C.
You don’t want to run into either, but positive lightning may be considered more dangerous because its peak electric current is often stronger, the flash duration (continuing) is typically longer, and its peak charge can be much greater than a negative strike. The longer-duration current is thought to make it more likely to ignite fires, as well. These strikes can travel much farther from their parent storm clouds, sometimes striking “out of the blue” more than ten miles away from the actual thunderstorm.
Stepped Leaders Move in Precise 50-Meter Steps Before Lightning Strikes
Each step is typically about 50 meters (150 ft) in length. Stepped leaders tend to branch out as they seek a connection with the positive charge on the ground. Under the influences of the electric field between the cloud and the ground, a very faint, negatively charged channel called a “stepped leader” emerges from the storm base and propagates toward the ground in a series of steps about 160 feet (50 meters) in length and 1 microsecond (0.000001 seconds) in duration.
Studies of individual strikes have shown that a single leader can comprise more than 10,000 steps! This means that a lightning strike traveling from cloud to ground might make thousands of these tiny advances, each one probing for the best path downward. The stepped leader creates the zigzag pattern we associate with lightning as it searches for the path of least resistance through varying air densities and electrical fields.
The Complete Lightning Process Happens in Just 1/133rd of a Second
The actual time between the appearance of the stepped leader in the cloud until the return stroke is about 1/133 of a second. The combination of the stepped leader and return stroke happens in just a fraction of a second. Despite all the complex electrical processes happening during a lightning strike, the entire visible flash occurs faster than the human eye can process.
In real time, all one would be able to see is the return stroke (bright flash) and never see the dart leaders progression toward the ground. This incredible speed explains why lightning appears to happen instantaneously, even though there are actually multiple complex stages occurring. High-speed cameras are required to capture the individual components of a lightning strike that our eyes cannot distinguish.
Return Strokes Travel at One-Third the Speed of Light
The rate at which the return stroke current travels has been found to be around 100,000 km/s (one-third of the speed of light). The highly visible return stroke moves upward through the leader channel at about 200 million miles per hour. This makes the return stroke one of the fastest naturally occurring phenomena on Earth.
Electrons accelerate rapidly as a result in a zone beginning at the point of attachment, which expands across the entire leader network at up to one third of the speed of light. The return stroke is what creates the brilliant flash we see, as it races back up the channel created by the stepped leader. This incredible speed is what allows the electrical charge to neutralize so quickly between the cloud and ground.
Lightning Channels Can Extend Over 5 Kilometers High
A typical cloud-to-ground lightning flash culminates in the formation of an electrically conducting plasma channel through the air in excess of 5 km (3.1 mi) tall, from within the cloud to the ground’s surface. These massive electrical pathways connect the charged regions in thunderclouds to the earth below, creating temporary bridges of superheated plasma.
The length of these channels helps explain why thunder can be heard from such great distances and why the sound seems to roll and echo for several seconds. Although a lightning discharge usually strikes just one spot on the ground, it travels many miles through the air. When you listen to thunder, you’ll first hear the thunder created by that portion of the lightning channel that is nearest you. The sound from different parts of the long channel reaches your ears at slightly different times.
Multiple Lightning Strokes Use the Same Channel with 40-50 Millisecond Gaps
Each re-strike is separated by a relatively large amount of time, typically 40 to 50 milliseconds, as other charged regions in the cloud are discharged in subsequent strokes. High-speed videos (examined frame-by-frame) show that most negative CG lightning flashes are made up of 3 or 4 individual strokes, though there may be as many as 30.
Once the return stroke ceases flowing up the channel, there is a pause of about 20 to 50 milliseconds. If, after the pause, there is enough charge still available within the cloud, another leader can propagate down to the ground. This leader is called a “dart leader” because it uses the channel already established by the stepped leader and therefore has a continuous path. This explains the flickering appearance of lightning and why some strikes appear to pulse or strobe.
Graupel Ice Particles Create Lightning Through Temperature-Dependent Charging
Scientists think that the initial process for creating charge regions in thunderstorms involves small hail particles called graupel that are roughly one quarter millimeter to a few millimeters in diameter and are growing by collecting even smaller supercooled liquid droplets. When these graupel particles collide and bounce off of smaller ice particles, the graupel gains one sign of charge and the smaller ice particle gains the other sign of charge. Because the smaller ice particles rise faster in updrafts than the graupel particles, the charge on ice particles separates from the charge on graupel particles, and the charge on ice particles collects above the charge on graupel.
Laboratory studies suggest that graupel gains positive charge at temperatures a little colder than 32 degrees Fahrenheit, but gains negative charge at colder temperatures a little higher in the storm. This temperature-dependent charging mechanism is crucial for understanding how thunderstorms develop the electrical potential needed for lightning strikes, with different altitudes in the storm creating different charge distributions.
Lightning Can Reach Over One Billion Volts of Electricity
Each bolt can contain up to one billion volts of electricity. Lightning can have 100 million to 1 billion volts, and contains billions of watts. The potential difference between cloud and ground is of the order of 10 to 100 million volts, and the peak currents in return strokes to negative leaders are typically about 30,000 amperes.
This enormous electrical potential is what allows lightning to overcome the natural insulating properties of air. The voltage must be high enough to break down the air’s resistance and create a conductive pathway. Despite these incredibly high voltages, the duration is so brief that many people can survive direct lightning strikes, though the experience often causes severe injuries and lasting health effects.
The 2024 Lightning Landscape Showed Surprising Midwestern Activity
Last year, AEM’s Earth Networks Total Lightning Network® detected over 459 million lightning pulses within 80 million lightning flashes across the U.S., a 17.7% decrease from 2023. The report documents an extraordinary year where traditional patterns were upended, as Midwestern states witnessed lightning activity typically reserved for Dixie Alley and lower parts of Tornado Alley. This unusual shift challenges decades of established weather patterns and signals potential long-term changes in severe weather distribution across the United States.
The report showed that in 2024, Illinois and Iowa experienced abnormally vigorous storm seasons, propelling them into the top 10 states for lightning flash density. Iowa set a new state record with 125 tornadoes in 2024, while Illinois faced over 100 tornadoes by mid-July, double its annual average. Consequently, both states recorded substantial year-over-year increases in lightning activity, with Iowa and Illinois experiencing 24% and 9% more lightning flashes than in 2023, respectively. This dramatic shift in lightning patterns suggests changing climate dynamics affecting traditional storm corridors across America.
