Whois & Analysis for meteoplaza.com

A thunderstorm, also known as an electrical storm, lightning storm, or thundershower, is a storm characterized by the presence of lightning and its acoustic effect on the Earth's atmosphere, known as thunder.

Thunderstorms occur in association with a type of cloud known as a cumulonimbus.

They are usually accompanied by strong winds, heavy rain, and sometimes snow, sleet, hail, or, in contrast, no precipitation at all.

Thunderstorms may line up in a series or become a rainband, known as a squall line.

Strong or 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.

Lightning is a sudden electrostatic discharge that occurs during a thunder storm.

This discharge occurs between electrically charged regions of a cloud (called intra-cloud lightning or IC), between two clouds (CC lightning), or between a cloud and the ground (CG lightning).

The charged regions in the atmosphere temporarily equalize themselves through this discharge referred to as a strike if it hits an object on the ground, and a flash, if it occurs within a cloud.

Lightning causes light in the form of plasma, and sound in the form of .

Lightning may be seen and not heard when it occurs at a distance too great for the sound to carry as far as the light from the strike or flash.

Rain is liquid water in the form of droplets that have condensed from atmospheric water vapor and then precipitated—that is, become heavy enough to fall under gravity.

Rain is a major component of the water cycle and is responsible for depositing most of the fresh water on the Earth.

It provides suitable conditions for many types of ecosystems, as well as water for hydroelectric power plants and crop irrigation.

Weather forecasting is the application of science and technology to predict the state of the atmosphere for a given location.

Human beings have attempted to predict the weather informally for millennia, and formally since the nineteenth century.

Weather forecasts are made by collecting quantitative data about the current state of the atmosphere at a given place and using scientific understanding of atmospheric processes to project how the atmosphere will change.