Every second forty lightning strikes and there are about 2,000 storms discharging their energy at the same time on the planet, according to data accumulated by NASA. In total, the around 1,200 million lightning strikes produced per year in the world are concentrated especially on the continents, in the equatorial zone and in large mountainous regions.
Lightning bolts and flashes!
All these rays are not generated or fell in the same way. Lightning is the electrical discharge produced in a storm, and meteorologists distinguish between several types: lightning from cloud to ground, in which case the electrical discharge reaches the earth’s surface; ground-to-cloud lightning, a discharge between the earth’s surface and the storm cloud; and finally, cloud-to-cloud lightning, which occurs between areas of the cloud that are not in contact with the ground.
Most of the electrical discharges generated by storms are intracloud –between two areas inside the storm cloud–, intercloud –lightning bolts between two separate clouds– or between a cloud and an area of free sky. Likewise, a rare phenomenon that is difficult to see is that of globular rays, also known as sparkles, ball rays or luminous spheres; discharges tend to float or glide in the air and take on a spheroidal appearance.
Precisely the least frequent lightning strikes are those of the cloud-ground type, despite the fact that they sometimes strike tens of thousands in just a few hours. The most ionized air is that generated in the cloud environment, although, under very stormy situations, this ionization spreads over a large part of the lower and middle atmosphere, producing the extraordinarily hot rays.
