Electrical Storm

The rain pours down all around you, saturating the surface of the earth with a cleansing sheet of fresh water, heavenly in its purity, devilishly sinister in its capacity to transform a landscape from fertile into a filled floodplain. You stand under the sheet of grey clouds and watch the lighting, wondering if this pool of water could catch a bolt and shock you into oblivion. Better to go back inside and not test fate. A thunderstorm, also known as an electrical storm, a lightning storm, thundershower or simply a storm is a form of weather characterized by the presence of lightning and its acoustic effect on the Earth's atmosphere known as thunder. The meteorologically assigned cloud type associated with the thunderstorm is the cumulonimbus. Thunderstorms are usually accompanied by strong winds, heavy rain and sometimes snow, sleet, hail, or no precipitation at all. Those which cause hail to fall are known as hailstorms. Thunderstorms may line up in a series or rainband, known as a squall line. Strong or severe thunderstorms may rotate, known as supercells. While most thunderstorms move with the mean wind flow through the layer of the troposphere that they occupy, vertical wind shear causes a deviation in their course at a right angle to the wind shear direction. There are four main types of thunderstorms: single-cell, multicell, squall line (also called multicell line) and supercell. Which type forms depends on the instability and relative wind conditions at different layers of the atmosphere ("wind shear").