Lightning Earth!

I've known about that for a while, myself. I used to live in the Tampa Bay area of Florida, the lighting capital of the U.S.; near the area of '16 and up' on the map below.

http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/images/map.pdf

Yeah...when the ground is taken off an aircraft, the voltage with respect to ground varied wildly. It wasnt the aircraft changing voltage, but rather the surface of the earth, changing in response to the clouds moving overhead.

This becomes important when you go to refuel an ungrounded aircraft with a grounded tender.....

Have any of you ever experienced black lightning? It is the only way I can explain it.

The Black fingers come up out of the ground, the lightning bolt comes down to meet it. Whitnessed this in a 40ft circle and a 5 foot strike. Since then, I love lightning, I tend to stay away from any metal. On this night, I had my Bass strapped on and was playing connected through an amp until the bolt hit while watching the storm come to me. I don't do that any more. So many fingers, so much lightning, the strike on the fire hydrant 10 feet away blinded me for several minutes. That was it for me. I still Love storms, I have much more respect for them now. Seeing the Spires and such it is an awesome thing.

Yes, sorry, it is a generations old knowledge.

When an electrical storm passes over, usually the front of the cloud is loaded with negative ions, and the trailing edge of the cloud is loaded with positive ions. Lightning on the leading edge of the storm is usually from the cloud to ground, usually resulting in a clear strike point (i.e.,it hits something like a lightning rod or tree). As the storm passes, the lightning on the trailing edge of the storm can be positive clouds drawing electrons from the earth (reversal of polarity). My experience is that there is no clear strike point, but the boom is a whole lot louder...

There was some work done in the 1990's in Florida where a bunch of EPRI researchers fired tethered rockets into thunder clouds to study lightning. They got some amazing pictures (unfortunately, the published ones appear to be only Black and White).

Anyone interested, one of the reports was published by EPRI as TR-109669-R1 (you can download from the EPRI site) in 1998.

Tanks all for the reply´s! This is in fact amazing phenomenas! Still the "sprites" are yet more bizarre, and puzzle me... I´ve witnessed something similar, but with more intensity, and I don't quite know the real nature, or origin, of such "thunders"!

have you all a nice day!

You can build a cheap radio to listen to distant storms...sprites and whistlers, spherics and tweeks...check it out:

http://www.backyardastronomy.net/vlf_receiver.html

It's a very interesting hobby.

One of the things [ideas] brought forward in a 1960's Electronics course at the Tulsa Tech. College by our instructor was the theroy that the lighting source was in the earth and was discharged to the clouds..He said look at the tree itself and the way it is split..The charge would move through the earth until it came to a discharge point the highest conductor closest to the the charged cloud.

Another aspect of lightning that many people never think of is the formation of a fulgerite or frozen lightning that happens often from a ground strike. Check out here for some pretty pictures.

Toward the end of your link is a discussion of work "...Allan McCollum has done, however, not one but some hundreds of times in the summer of 1997...in cooperation with the University of Florida's International Center for Lightning Research and Testing and their base of operations was at the Camp Blanding national guard base near Starke, Florida..."

This is the project described in the EPRI report that I referenced earlier. First time I have seen the pictures in color!

The EPRI report goes in to quite a bit of detail on mearsurements conducted and attempts at computer simulation of the effects of lightning, and offers some additional technical notes on the formation of fulgurites.

This is fascinating stuff...

This is nothing new, I have known about this the past 55 years or so, and yes your friend is right!