50 Fun Facts About Lightning

Roughly how hot does the air around a lightning flash get?

That is several times hotter than the surface of the Sun, which is why the channel glows brilliant blue-white.

What causes thunder?

The rolling rumble comes from sound arriving from different parts of the long, branching channel at slightly different times.

What is the scientific study of lightning called?

The World Meteorological Organization lists lightning as an Essential Climate Variable.

Which of the three primary forms of lightning is the most common?

Flashes within a single thundercloud far outnumber the strikes that reach the ground, which make up only about 25% worldwide.

Cloud-to-ground lightning is started by what moving down from the cloud?

It is met by an upward streamer from the ground; once they attach, the main discharge follows.

What is the most luminous part of a lightning discharge called?

It races back up the leader network at up to a third of the speed of light.

Positive lightning makes up roughly what share of all strikes?

Positive bolts are rarer but far more intense, with peak currents up to 400 kA and long continuing currents that start fires.

Positive strikes that travel long distances through clear air, giving no warning, are known as what?

Positive lightning is also blamed for triggering sprites tens of kilometres above the ground.

What is the electric current of an average negative lightning bolt?

It transfers about 15 coulombs of charge and a gigajoule of energy in a flash.

In a thunderstorm, collisions between ice crystals and which soft hail particles separate charge?

The ice crystals become positive and ride the updraft to the top; the heavier graupel goes negative and sinks.

Which region of a thunderstorm cloud typically becomes positively charged?

A small pocket of positive charge near the bottom gives mature storms a tripolar structure.

Roughly what electric field strength does damp air need to break down and spark?

The atmosphere normally acts as an insulator between the charged regions until that threshold is passed.

Roughly how many times per second does lightning strike somewhere on Earth?

That adds up to nearly 1.4 billion flashes a year, about 70% of them over land in the tropics.

Over which lake does the Catatumbo phenomenon produce the most lightning on Earth, some 250 bolts a day?

The show runs on average 297 nights a year in Venezuela.

The village of Kifuka, second in the world for lightning density, is in which country?

At around 975 metres up, it takes about 158 strikes per square kilometre a year; Singapore and Central Florida's Lightning Alley are other hotspots.

What is a 'megaflash'?

They only occur in mesoscale convective systems and typically last more than five seconds.

How long was the longest lightning flash ever observed, recorded across Texas and Kansas in October 2017?

It touched ground in five states and was only identified in 2025 from Geostationary Lightning Mapper data.

How long did the record lightning flash over Uruguay and Argentina on 18 June 2020 last?

It beat the previous record, also from Argentina, by 0.37 seconds.

On which planet did Voyager 1 discover lightning, at first dubbed an 'electrostatic discharge'?

Jupiter's lightning is far more energetic than Earth's, and a new type there seems to come from ammonia 'mushballs'.

Which rover's microphone recorded a putative detection of lightning on Mars, reported in 2025?

Earlier claims of Martian electric discharges from 2009 could not be reproduced.

What are the glassy tubes called that form when lightning melts sandy soil?

The channel of plasma fuses the sand around it into a hollow, branching tube.

Why is a lightning strike generally not dangerous to an aircraft?

Passengers usually never know it happened, though a nearby flash can blind the pilot for a moment or upset compasses.

Roughly what percentage of people struck by lightning survive?

Survivors often suffer damage to internal organs and the nervous system.

What kills more people in groups than the bolt itself does?

The huge current spreads out through the surface, and can flow up one leg and down the other of anyone standing nearby.

A three-second delay between lightning and thunder means the strike was how far away?

Sound covers about 343 metres per second, so five seconds is roughly a mile.

Lightning can be seen from over 160 km away, but thunder only travels roughly how far?

That is why 'heat lightning' flickers silently on a summer horizon.

What smell may accompany a very close lightning strike?

The heat splits oxygen and nitrogen molecules, making ozone and nitrogen oxides.

Lightning plays a role in the nitrogen cycle by turning atmospheric nitrogen into what?

Each flash in temperate regions makes about 7 kg of nitrogen oxides on average.

Roughly what share of forest fires worldwide are started by lightning?

It is the major natural cause of wildfire, and Arctic lightning fires may rise with climate change.

Who first predicted, in 1925, that lightning produces X-rays?

No evidence appeared until 2001-02, when rocket-triggered strikes in New Mexico gave off X-rays.

What surprising signature was found in lightning in the 2000s alongside terrestrial gamma-ray flashes?

Secondary particles from these flashes can reach energies of tens of MeV.

Which natural magnets are theorised to have been created by lightning-induced remanent magnetism?

The intense current can permanently magnetise rock, soil or metal in its path.

Benjamin Franklin installed which early thunderstorm-warning device in his house?

It was based on the 'electric chimes' invented by Andrew Gordon in 1742.

Scientists trigger lightning on demand at Camp Blanding, Florida, by launching what into storms?

The wire vaporises in the return current, leaving a dead-straight plasma channel to study.

Which spacecraft was famously struck by lightning shortly after lift-off?

Aircraft contrails have also been seen to nudge lightning slightly, offering a lower-resistance path.

Lightning that occurs during a winter snowstorm is called what?

Positive lightning tends to be more common in such winter storms and in intense tornadoes.

Wildfires like Australia's in 2019-20 can create which cloud type that makes its own lightning?

Such fire-made storms can also spawn dry lightning, fire tornadoes and dirty hail.

How many times a year, on average, does lightning strike the Empire State Building?

So much for 'never strikes twice': tall, conductive objects get hit again and again.

In French and Italian, the expression for love at first sight literally means what?

Coup de foudre and colpo di fulmine both use the image of a bolt from the sky.

Which Norse god was associated with lightning?

Zeus, Indra, Perun, the Yoruba god Sango and the Shinto god Raijin all held the same portfolio elsewhere.

What is divination based on omens read from thunder and lightning, practised by the Etruscans, called?

It is a kind of aeromancy; the Etruscans wrote whole guides to it.

What is a bolt of lightning called in heraldry?

It usually stands for power and speed, and is NATO's symbol for a signal asset.

The German word Blitzkrieg means what?

The Nazi SS logo used the Sig rune, another lightning symbol.

Who took the first known photograph of lightning, in 1847?

That image is lost; the oldest surviving photo is William Nicholson Jennings's from 1882.

Most negative cloud-to-ground flashes are made up of how many individual strokes?

Re-strikes 40 to 50 milliseconds apart produce the familiar strobe-light flicker; there can be as many as 30.

Innsbruck researchers calculated a severe storm's magnetic fields within 200 metres could cause what in bystanders?

The effect would resemble transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Which Aztec god is associated with lightning?

Other lightning deities include Slavic Perun, Finnish Ukko, Hindu Indra, Yoruba Sango and Shinto Raijin.

Radio pulses recorded by which ESA orbiter, arriving in April 2006, hint at lightning on the second planet?

Cassini's brief 1999 Venus fly-by had detected no signs of lightning, keeping the question controversial.

Since 2016, NOAA's GOES-R weather satellites carry which flash-spotting instrument, abbreviated GLM?

It is a near-infrared optical transient detector that catches momentary changes in the scene below.

Which of Singapore's political parties uses a lightning flash as its symbol?

The British Union of Fascists in the 1930s also used a lightning-flash emblem.