ORIGINAL: captinjohn
Right...did you ever see lightning travel from earth upwards??? No the high voltage seeks the ground. HA ~ and thats the rest of the story! [img][/img]
Does lightning strike from the sky down, or the ground up?
The answer is both. Cloud-to-ground lightning comes from the sky down, but the part you see comes from the ground up. A typical cloud-to-ground flash lowers a path of negative electricity (that we cannot see) towards the ground in a series of spurts. Objects on the ground generally have a positive charge. Since opposites attract, an upward streamer is sent out from the object about to be struck. When these two paths meet, a return stroke zips back up to the sky. It is the return stroke that produces the visible flash, but it all happens so fast - in about one-millionth of a second - so the human eye doesn't see the actual formation of the stroke.
From [link]http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/faq/faq_ltg.php[/link]
Now where's the popcorn - It's all your fault John
