Lightning
See also: LightningRelationships between lightning frequency and the height of precipitation within thunderstorms have been found. Thunderstorms which show radar returns above 14 kilometres (8.7 mi) in height are associated with storms which have more than ten lightning flashes per minute. There is also a correlation between the total lightning rate and the size of the thunderstorm, its updraft velocity, and amount of graupel over land. The same relationships fail over tropical oceans, however. Lightning from low precipitation (LP) thunderstorms is one of the leading causes of wildfires.
Read more about this topic: Air-mass Thunderstorm
Famous quotes containing the word lightning:
“How oft when men are at the point of death
Have they been merry! which their keepers call
A lightning before death: O, how may I
Call this a lightning? O my love! my wife!
Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty:
Thou art not conquered; beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature,—here they are, side by side, god and devil, mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, riding peacefully together in the eye and brain of every man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)