Lightning over Colorado
Have you ever watched a lightning storm in awe? Join the crowd. Oddly, nobody knows exactly how lightning is produced. What is known is that charges slowly separate in some clouds causing rapid electrical discharges (lightning), but how electrical charges get separated in clouds remains a topic of much research.
Lightning usually takes a jagged course, rapidly heating a thin column of air to about three times the surface temperature of the Sun. The resulting shock wave starts supersonically and decays into the loud sound known as thunder. Lightning bolts are common in clouds during rainstorms, and on average 44 lightning bolts occur on the Earth every second.
Pictured, over 60 images were stacked to capture the flow of lightning-producing storm clouds in July over Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA.
Image & info via APOD
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Image Credit & Copyright: Joe Randall
#naturalphenomena #lightning #nasa #space
I do wonder what the average energy of a lightning bolt is. Shame we can't harness the power (yet...), I can imagine one storm may even be able to power a city
ReplyDeleteI had a lightning bolt hit a tree not 30 feet from me back 1970ish, and it picked me up, threw me 40 feet, without being hurt, thank goodness, so, the absolute physical power , aside from the electricity of Lightning is awesome and actually frightful...
ReplyDeleteWell if static can build up in the hose of an airless paint sprayer and discharge (if not grounded) into the air and explode the paint therein, causing a massive fireball in the enclosed space used by the fool who didn't ground his line, seems the same as in clouds with their suspended dust and moisture.
ReplyDeleteSam Collett: en.wikipedia.org - Harvesting lightning energy - Wikipedia has some interesting information about that line of research. A billion joules per strike, but there isn't enough energy per unit time, over the course of months, to equal the amount of energy you'd put into building the equipment to harvest it. (Which is unfortunately often the case with waste energy harvesting schemes.)
ReplyDeleteOur ways of creating energy seem so primitive and crude by comparison to how nature works. The 'MPG' efficiency of a human converting a cake into energy is probably more efficient than any petroleum based car
ReplyDeleteSam Collett: I regularly wear a shirt that has a picture of a bicycle subtitled "107 miles per burrito." Cars suck, thermodynamically. But stuff like big nuclear/coal-fired power plants are more efficient than bikes. We can do effcient stuff, we just don't generally choose to because energy is still cheap. For what it's worth, even cheap crappy solar cells have higher sunlight-energy conversion efficiency than plants, and good cells are about 20 times better than plants. But, again, that's because for plants it's free energy. (and there are a bunch of other reasons having to do with the difficulty in, again, capturing what is essentially waste energy that has low power density.)
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing Miss Corina....:-)...
ReplyDelete