⛈️ Storms and extremes

A thunderstorm forms when warm, moist air rises quickly and cools, building a tall, powerful cloud packed with strong updrafts, rain, lightning and thunder. Inside that cloud, rising and falling air currents crash together violently, which is exactly what builds up the electric charge that becomes lightning. Most thunderstorms last less than an hour, but a strong one can dump a huge amount of rain and produce dangerous lightning in that short time.

Inside a storm cloud, rising ice crystals and falling hail chunks rub against each other constantly, and that rubbing strips electrons off some particles and piles them onto others, building up separate pools of positive and negative charge. When the difference in charge grows large enough, electricity suddenly leaps across the gap as a bolt, either between two parts of the same cloud, between two clouds, or between a cloud and the ground. A lightning bolt is actually made up of several rapid strikes happening in a fraction of a second, which is why it sometimes looks like it flickers.

A hurricane is a massive, spinning storm that forms over warm ocean water, powered by heat and moisture rising off the sea, which fuels huge bands of thunderstorms spiralling around a calm centre called the eye. Hurricanes only form over warm enough ocean water, which is why they weaken quickly once they move over land or cooler water and lose their fuel source. The same kind of storm gets different names in different parts of the world, hurricane, typhoon, and cyclone all describe the same weather event.

A tornado is a violently spinning column of air that stretches down from a storm cloud to touch the ground, forming when winds at different heights blow at different speeds and directions, causing the air between them to start rotating. That rotating air gets pulled tighter and spins faster as it stretches downward, similar to how a spinning ice skater speeds up when they pull their arms in close. Tornadoes are usually much smaller than hurricanes but can have far faster spinning winds, making them incredibly destructive in the narrow path they travel.