Here's how much electricity was measured in one thundercloud
New research gives a clearer picture as to just how much raw power a given storm might be packing.
Scientists have long known that the amount of electricity generated in a thundercloud must be staggering, but have struggled to come up with reliable estimates of just HOW much raw power might be raging above your head during a thunderstorm.
Now, researchers at India's Tata Institute of Fundamental Research have come up with an estimate: About 1.3 gigavolts, or 1.3 billion volts -- a little more than 10 million times the 120-volt output of a wall socket in Canada.
"If you dissipate this massive amount of energy through anything, it is going to cause severe devastation," one of the researchers, Sunil Gupta, told LiveScience.
That level of energy was detected in one of the 184 thunderstorms that passed over the the southern Indian city of from April 2011 to December 2014.
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The study relied on data gathered from the GRAPES-3 muon telescope in Ooty. Muons are heavy particles generated when cosmic rays strike other particles in the atmosphere. They are much heavier than other particles, so they descend rapidly, losing energy when they strike a barrier of some kind, like an electrically charged field.
"Thunderstorms have a positively charged layer on top and a negatively charged layer on bottom," Gupta told LiveScience. "If a positively charged muon hits the cloud as it rains down from the upper atmosphere, it's going to be repelled and lose energy."
It was this loss of energy, measured by the telescope, that allowed the researchers to extrapolate the electical energy in the cloud.
The study was published in Physical Review Letters earlier this month.