Updrafts of 5 mph have been found to produce little lightning, but ones of 90 mph cough up a lightning bolt every second. Correcting Some Misconceptions Other researchers reported at the Alabama meeting that lightning occurs far more often over land than water. This apparently is because the ground releases its warmth more quickly, causing the convection that fuels storms. And lightning tends to strike more often in the afternoon than any other time of day. Despite all the research, misconceptions about lightning persist.
Lightning looks like a bolt of fire coming down from the clouds.
But what's happening is really far more complex. Lightning does begin in the clouds, which serve as turbocharged mixing chambers of positively and negatively charged ions. The two meet a little above the ground in an electrostatic collision, sending electrons flowing to Earth. But the brilliant bolt of lightning that we see is caused by the positive charge from the ground traveling back up the ionized path to the cloud. It happens too quickly for the human eye to see that the bolt is actually traveling up, not down.