On average lightning strikes register between 5, and 20, amps, but have been reported over , amps. Sometimes, you will see voltage representations, but amperage is the industry norm for reporting the strength of lightning strikes. All lightning is hot and this is instead referencing the intensity of amperage and length of time the strike is sustained.
Polarity — indicates the flow of a positive or negative charge. Generally, these pulses are on the lower side of the amperage scale. This is due to positive lightning strikes originating higher in the clouds and needing to travel a farther distance to reach the ground, therefore requiring more energy. The takeaways: lightning is dangerous, with the amperage reflecting how much damage that particular pulse could cause. Cloud to ground may cause fires, network failures, and life endangerment.
Intracloud strikes may cause issues with communications, planes, and unmanned aircraft. From fisherman on a lake, farmers in the field or lineman working on a power grid, supplying lightning notifications and visualization can go a long way to improving the safety margin and application value to employees and customers. Numerous industries are consistently impacted by lightning, including agriculture, insurance, utilities, transportation and telecommunications.
When properly employed, lightning data can supercharge your risk management and network security plans. By knowing precisely where lighting is being reported now and what assets are in the line of fire, businesses can enact procedures that can minimize asset risk and improve system reliability. Each of these segments is about feet 46 meters long.
When the lowermost step comes within feet 46 meters of a positively charged object, it is met by a climbing surge of positive electricity, called a streamer, which can rise up through a building, a tree, or even a person.
When the two connect, an electrical current flows as negative charges fly down the channel towards earth and a visible flash of lightning streaks upward at some ,, mph ,, kph , transferring electricity as lightning in the process. Some types of lightning, including the most common types, never leave the clouds but travel between differently charged areas within or between clouds.
Other rare forms can be sparked by extreme forest fires, volcanic eruptions, and snowstorms. Ball lightning, a small, charged sphere that floats, glows, and bounces along oblivious to the laws of gravity or physics, still puzzles scientists. About one to 20 cloud-to-ground lightning bolts is "positive lightning," a type that originates in the positively charged tops of stormclouds. These strikes reverse the charge flow of typical lightning bolts and are far stronger and more destructive.
Positive lightning can stretch across the sky and strike "out of the blue" more than 10 miles from the storm cloud where it was born. About 2, people are killed worldwide by lightning each year. Hundreds more survive strikes but suffer from a variety of lasting symptoms, including memory loss, dizziness, weakness, numbness, and other life-altering ailments. Strikes can cause cardiac arrest and severe burns, but 9 of every 10 people survive. The average American has about a 1 in 5, chance of being struck by lightning during a lifetime.
Lightning's extreme heat will vaporize the water inside a tree, creating steam that may blow the tree apart. Cars are havens from lightning—but not for the reason that most believe. Tires conduct current, as do metal frames that carry a charge harmlessly to the ground. Many houses are grounded by rods and other protection that conduct a lightning bolt's electricity harmlessly to the ground. Homes may also be inadvertently grounded by plumbing, gutters, or other materials.
Grounded buildings offer protection, but occupants who touch running water or use a landline phone may be shocked by conducted electricity. A supercell thunderstorm strikes in South Dakota.
Among the most severe storms, supercells can bring strong winds, hail, and even tornadoes. See more extreme weather pictures. You might fly a kite in an electrical storm with a wire attached to the capacitor and the other lead to ground. Hey Paul or anyone else out there — I need help.
I was told that a 1. Is it wrong that I divided the volts by 15 joules and came up with the number 20, then was able to assume that if I had a heart defibrillator, containing joules of energy could produce 10, volts? Am I using funny math? Also, if a thermoelectric generator was placed into a stationary orbit in space to absorb 2, degrees F and use a capacitor to amplify and store that energy, what would the voltage capacity be?
Then, if that voltage was stored into a capacitor to multiply the voltage, what would it be? I have experimented with high voltage my entire life. You have a great article here, but a bolt of lightning only 40kv to kv? That is not accurate at all. On my kitchen table is a device that produces kv and the Sparks are only 8 inches long…. Lightning is known, as a standard, to have a voltage potential of million volts. This is a well studied number. The electric field under a storm allows the bolt to penetrate through more air than normal.
Replace kv with million volts. There is elecromagnetic energy all around us. Try placing a grid of copper wires above ground with one end grounded and the other end to a transformer.. You will get volts…. If the tower that attracted the lightning and was well insulated from the ground had a coil that directed that charge to ground, and if it had a heavy solid magnet in the middle of that coil, then the electricity would raise that magnet as the charge went down the down the wire.
The same king of brake as you find in a standard elevator would prevent that weight from falling striaght back down again.
That potential energy would be stored energy as long as the great bolt can be efffectively shunted to prevent from daining that energy off with it.. Using the top of the tower as a mast for high flying Ben Franklin kites could get that conductor much higher into the storm clouds. Mulitiple directionalble kites could spread the collection area out both vertically and horizontally.
That way it could collect more positive ions from the storm cloud. This way the charge could be collected gradually. The point is not to force a violent discharge but to collect the energy from the system befoere it happens. Of course the number of negative ions in the ground will always be one limiting factor but radio towers already spread out huge wheels of grounding wires to dissipate lightning energy- to prevent damage to the radio equipment, cell phone electronics and more.
This is a well understood and a well developed technology. If nothing else I believe this possible technology should be studied to provide -if nothing more — emergency power for areas afflicted by storms. You could even use that energy to pump water. There are tens of thousands of towers already erected from existing high voltage power towers to cell phone towers that could be potentially retofiited with a system that collects the energy of lightning.
I also have no idea how such an extraction of this energy might affect the storms that produce them — possitively or negetively. At any rate if we actually started to develope this technology it would most likely be at a slow enough pace for us to to be able ask and answer those questions long before they become crises events.
Although a single strike of lightning does last a mili-second many lightning discharges have multiple discharges called dart leaders. Methinks that strapping an alternator around the equator is a better idea and we will skip the capacitors. Hi paul, Keith brought up a really good point. That would actually bring ur calculation to somethin like 2. Either way, i think a lighting bolt only has enough energy to power on 1 single lighting bulb, for 3 or 4 months.
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