Heat lighting???

Question

Does anyone know what causes heatlighting?? And aslo, why is it all colorful instead of like normal lighting?

Answer 1

Heat lightning is a name given to a flash in the night sky that occurs when there

is a lightning-producing thunderstorm very far away from the observer

Answer 2

What you call heat lightning is in fact lightning far away and therefore silent. But it can also appear to be such because the discharge of static electricity doesn't happen between clouds and the earth but between clouds and clouds.

The reason it is called heat lightning is that it happens often when it is hot, but not always. Thunderstorms happen when the air is unstable, that is: when the temperature fall with altitude is higher than the dry air adiabatic cooling which is roughly one degree Celsius per 100 meter of altitude.

When that happens and there is sufficient moist and warm air at on the ground, the ascending air continues until reaching the tropopause; the top of the troposphere where all weather happens.

During the summer, a hot spell in the temperature latitudes often ends with the passing of a cold front with unstable air masses (cold climbing over hot) and thunderstorms.

Answer 3

There is no such thing as "heat lightning." All that you are seeing is lightning from a distant thunderstorm that is so far away from you that you can not hear thunder. This is a misconception among most people and that is how it got the term "heat lightning." At night on a clear night you can see lightning up to 100 miles away. Here is a good site on lightning.

http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/primer/lightnin...