the.com/thunderstorm
the sky's tantrum, complete with five-mile sparks and a sound that arrives late
means A storm marked by thunder and lightning, usually with heavy rain, gusty wind, and sometimes hail, produced by towering cumulonimbus clouds.
from A plain compound of Old English roots: 'thunor,' the noise itself (and the namesake of Thunor/Thor, the hammer-swinging god the Anglo-Saxons heard in the sky), joined to 'storm,' a word for violent weather that runs deep through the Germanic languages. 'Thunder' is a cousin of German 'Donner' and Latin 'tonare,' to thunder — all echoing the same rumble. So the word is, quite literally, the storm that thunders.
- bolt heat
- Lightning is five times hotter than the sun's surface
- thunder lag
- Light wins the race, so sound arrives late
- earth's pulse
- Roughly 2,000 storms rage worldwide every moment
- nitrogen factory
- Bolts forge fertilizer, feeding plants from thin air
- updraft engine
- Air rockets upward fast enough to suspend hailstones
derecho of june 2012 — straight-line wind storm across midwest us that killed 22 people and caused $2.7 billion in damage
amazon thunderstorms — daily afternoon storms over the amazon basin reaching 50,000 feet, among earth's most violent and frequent