Does anyone know the lightning strike process?

Question

Does anyone know the lightning strike process?

Answer 1

Lightning is an electric discharge due to electric charges in clouds and the Earth.  Lightning can be cloud to cloud, within the same cloud, cloud to ground or ground to cloud.    Clouds can become charged in many ways such as moving across the earth, rain drops moving past each other, and the electric imbalances within the clouds themselves or between them and the Earth.

Here are a few examples of the complexity of electric charges.  While moving across the Earth, clouds can pick up electrons from the ground.  This means that the bottom of the cloud now has a negative change and the ground has a positive charge.  It also means that the bottom of the cloud has a negative charge and the top of the cloud becomes positively charges.  Since opposite charges attract, negative charges at the bottom of the cloud would move toward the top and positive charges at the top would move toward the bottom.  This action makes the bottom of the cloud less negative and the charge between the cloud and the Earth can now be the same as the Earth's or different depending on the strength of the charges.

Anytime the charges build up to the point where the electric field can overcome the resistance between clouds, or within the cloud, or between the cloud and the earth, an electrical discharge which we call lightning happens.

Answer 2

1) clouds rub together and create charged particles

2) the particles overflow and a leader bold rushes to the ground, quickly making the air around it into plasma.

3) after the leader bolt, a follower shoots down as the leader comes back up.

4)final strike of lightning as another follower comes down

5)the above stems take less than a second to complete.