Have you ever been in a strong thunderstorm? Or have you seen trees getting uprooted from the ground after the thunderstorm? You might have had a power failure because of a thunderstorm, but have you ever thought how these strong winds, lightning, and heavy rains forms? Well, let’s see how it forms!

Thunderstorms are found in clouds called Cumulonimbus Clouds. They are those cauliflower-looking clouds which have a really dark base, and are white from the top. These clouds are vertically developed clouds.

In order to understand the process of a Thunderstorm formation, you must know the basic ingredients needed for a cloud to form.

When the sun heats up the ocean, the water starts to evaporate and mixes with the air in form of water vapours. When the air is warmer, it has a tendency to take more water vapors in it. And when the air is colder, it can’t hold a lot of water vapors. The sun also heats up the ground, the air near the ground heats up as well and it gets lighter. When the air is light, it rises and as it rises, the temperature decreases. So when the temperature gets cold, it can’t hold the amount of water vapors it is carrying. So when the air is cooled further more, it won’t be able to hold then a lot of water vapour and that water vapor will condense in forms of clouds. Remember, the air is still rising and that will push the cloud up, the cloud stays there and it builds up just like a smoke goes up in a volcanic eruption. As the cloud is building, the water particle in the cloud gets bigger and bigger. When a water particle gets big enough for the cloud to hold, it falls down as rain. So the rain gets heavier when cloud is building up at a faster rate.

The water droplets which are falling from the cloud also push the air as they are coming down, and some of the droplets evaporate, and it cools the air. Now what happens is that it forms a down flow of the wind, and when that wind hits the ground, it creates gusty winds. And sometimes these winds pick up sand with them and you can have a sand storm forming in front of a thunderstorm.

Now there is air rising because of the heat of the sun, and there is air coming down because of the water droplets. When that happens, clouds particles rub against each other and get charged. Some charges are negative and some are positive. Now as you know, water is the conductor of electricity, and these charged particles find its way through water and vapors to the uncharged particles and uncharged particle is ground (trees, poles, etc.). When highly charged particles make contact with the uncharged ground particles, they release tremendous amount of energy in form of light and heat. And that light and heat is what you see as lightning.

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