All You Need To Know About Lightning
Cloud-to-Ground Lightning
Cloud-to-ground lightning is the most spectacular lightning. It is the lightning bolt we see reaching from the sky to the ground forming a bright, usually forked bolt of light. The ground is the most conductive object that will release the most energy. This form usually occurs from the base of a negatively charged cloud. Sometimes there is a rarer form that happens from the the positive charge in the top of the cloud to the negative charge on the ground known as a positive flash. Only about 20 percent of all lightning reaches the ground. Over the entire Earth there are over 100 strikes every second. The United States gets approximately 40 million cloud-to-ground strikes per year.