page_title: Thunderstorm
section_title: Energy
hierarchical_section_title: Thunderstorm / Energy
caption_attribution_description: English: How thunderstorms launch particle beams into space
context_page_description: A thunderstorm, also known as an electrical storm or a lightning storm, is a storm characterized by the presence of lightning and its acoustic effect on the Earth's atmosphere, known as thunder. Relatively weak thunderstorms are sometimes called thundershowers. Thunderstorms occur in a type of cloud known as a cumulonimbus. They are usually accompanied by strong winds, and often produce heavy rain and sometimes snow, sleet, or hail, but some thunderstorms produce little precipitation or no precipitation at all. Thunderstorms may line up in a series or become a rainband, known as a squall line. Strong or severe thunderstorms include some of the most dangerous weather phenomena, including large hail, strong winds, and tornadoes. Some of the most persistent severe thunderstorms, known as supercells, rotate as do cyclones. While most thunderstorms move with the mean wind flow through the layer of the troposphere that they occupy, vertical wind shear sometimes causes a deviation in their course at a right angle to the wind shear direction.
  Thunderstorms result from the rapid upward movement of warm, moist air, sometimes along a front.
context_section_description: If the quantity of water that is condensed in and subsequently precipitated from a cloud is known, then the total energy of a thunderstorm can be calculated. In a typical thunderstorm, approximately 5×10⁸ kg of water vapor are lifted, and the amount of energy released when this condenses is 10¹⁵ joules. This is on the same order of magnitude of energy released within a tropical cyclone, and more energy than that released during the atomic bomb blast at Hiroshima, Japan in 1945.
  The Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor results show that gamma rays and antimatter particles (positrons) can be generated in powerful thunderstorms. It is suggested that the antimatter positrons are formed in terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGF). TGFs are brief bursts occurring inside thunderstorms and associated with lightning. The streams of positrons and electrons collide higher in the atmosphere to generate more gamma rays. About 500 TGFs may occur every day worldwide, but mostly go undetected.
caption: How thunderstorms launch particle beams into space
exif: {}