This may spark debate

These are trying times we live in. Some things we just can’t talk about with friends and family anymore. We’ve moved beyond civil discourse and common sense. Neighbor is pitted against neighbor. Co-worker against co-worker. Child against parent. Of course, I’m talking about football season!

As you plan for your Friday night lights, what you don’t want is Friday night lightning. Any spark shooting through the sky should pause the pigskin and quickly clear the bleachers. As we gradually cool through autumn and the air dries out, lightning becomes less common. That’s not a forecast, it’s an average. Depending on the weather pattern, we get thunderstorms at any time of the year. They are called thunderstorms because they are storms that make thunder. Lightning comes first, generating a shock wave we hear as thunder.

Lightning is nature’s warning to get inside. As deadly as it can be, it’s fascinating from a distance. One of the many weather questions I get over and over is, “Does lightning go up or down?” It may be a phone call from a husband and wife who are debating, or an email from a college kid. The answer is yes, and yes. Lightning goes up. Lightning goes down. I see lightning all around.

Lightning attempts to even out the electric field on Earth. Like air and water, electricity is a part of our environment, but we don’t notice it until there’s too much and it suddenly moves.

The lightning we see reaching the ground starts as a series of weak electrical charge segments, stepping down from the cloud and branching outward at the same time, seeking a source of current. Your eye doesn’t catch that because it is faint and happens in a tiny fraction of a second. What you do see is current shooting upward into the cloud. The upward flow of current illuminates something that was branching downward, so you process it as a flow of electricity downward. Think of the branching as tributaries of a river. Tributaries carry a substance into the main channel. This lightning process starts downward, but what you see is actually going upward.

Let’s flip that. Literally. Lightning can initiate at the ground, branching upward. In that case, the current does flow downward to the ground. When I say “ground” you can substitute soil, water, tree, building, or person — most often the tallest object, regardless of what it is made of.

Whenever lightning starts or ends at the ground, it’s called cloud-to-ground lightning. For as many thunderstorms as we get around here, we are lucky in that the majority of lightning on the Gulf Coast stays in the sky. It travels from one cloud to another, from part of a cloud to a different part of the same cloud, and from a cloud to the air.

So, there you have it. I’ve penned an entire article about lightning, with no lightning puns. I trust you are not shocked. You’re clapping, or is that thunderous applause?!