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Thunderstorm - Blog Posts
Day 60: There is a thunderstorm outside.
The sky is flashing so much, it needs a seizure warning and the thunder sounds like cannonballs.
I am afraid of dying. Our neighbors have a huge tree in their yard and in a strong storm it could break off and crush our roof.
I don't want to be crushed to death.
It's hailing outside too. Big ice balls, not yet big enough to Crack the windows but still making lots of noise.
We pulled all possible plugs. TV, Computer, Radios, even the coffee machine. They might get destroyed if lightning strikes.
I hate the noise that thunder makes. Thunderstorms, especially heat storms make me think of suffocating, burning and pressure.
Sometimes I just want to hide in a small nook with no bad noise or feeling.
I hear the wooden supports of our house making noise, it's horrible. I want to leave but outside is dangerous.
I don't know what to do.
I hate thunderstorms.
listening to stray kids, day6 and xdinary heroes while driving through a heavy thunderstorm is honestly so exhilarating when you’re a passenger princess
I look at the thunderstorm and clouds, being at the top of the tower and immersed in my own thoughts
So I normally love thunderstorms but this storm I’m in right now sounds suspicious/off. I don’t know if that makes sense. I’ve also been hearing with weird siren like sound outside but I don’t know what it is. It’s now 3:20 AM and I haven’t gone to sleep yet. Also I’m slightly panicking and I don’t know why.
update: It’s now 3:45 AM and my mom just left for work. I still have gotten no sleep.
See my other drawings.
Raphael waits Donatello, who had not yet returned to home. Above the town is raging strong thunderstorm. The coffee cools in the mug, which was addressed to Don. Raph is very worried about a loved one.
A little while ago the power went out. In the past when that happened I would just sit around and try to get the internet working again. However - this time around I got up and went outside to the porch. I just read a book listening to the rain hit the houses exterior. That is till a wasp got mad at me for existing- It’s not much but it’s improvement from the person I was, so I’ll take it.
Folks south Texas is having a major rain event! 10 to 15 inches in two weeks! Amazing!
What's Made in a Thunderstorm and Faster Than Lightning? Gamma Rays!
A flash of lightning. A roll of thunder. These are normal stormy sights and sounds. But sometimes, up above the clouds, stranger things happen. Our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has spotted bursts of gamma rays - some of the highest-energy forms of light in the universe - coming from thunderstorms. Gamma rays are usually found coming from objects with crazy extreme physics like neutron stars and black holes.
So why is Fermi seeing them come from thunderstorms?
Thunderstorms form when warm, damp air near the ground starts to rise and encounters colder air. As the warm air rises, moisture condenses into water droplets. The upward-moving water droplets bump into downward-moving ice crystals, stripping off electrons and creating a static charge in the cloud.
The top of the storm becomes positively charged, and the bottom becomes negatively charged, like two ends of a battery. Eventually the opposite charges build enough to overcome the insulating properties of the surrounding air - and zap! You get lightning.
Scientists suspect that lightning reconfigures the cloud's electrical field. In some cases this allows electrons to rush toward the upper part of the storm at nearly the speed of light. That makes thunderstorms the most powerful natural particle accelerators on Earth!
When those electrons run into air molecules, they emit a terrestrial gamma-ray flash, which means that thunderstorms are creating some of the highest energy forms of light in the universe. But that's not all - thunderstorms can also produce antimatter! Yep, you read that correctly! Sometimes, a gamma ray will run into an atom and produce an electron and a positron, which is an electron's antimatter opposite!
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope can spot terrestrial gamma-ray flashes within 500 miles of the location directly below the spacecraft. It does this using an instrument called the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor which is primarily used to watch for spectacular flashes of gamma rays coming from the universe.
There are an estimated 1,800 thunderstorms occurring on Earth at any given moment. Over the 10 years that Fermi has been in space, it has spotted about 5,000 terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. But scientists estimate that there are 1,000 of these flashes every day - we're just seeing the ones that are within 500 miles of Fermi's regular orbits, which don't cover the U.S. or Europe.
The map above shows all the flashes Fermi has seen since 2008. (Notice there's a blob missing over the lower part of South America. That's the South Atlantic Anomaly, a portion of the sky where radiation affects spacecraft and causes data glitches.)
Fermi has also spotted terrestrial gamma-ray flashes coming from individual tropical weather systems. The most productive system we've seen was Tropical Storm Julio in 2014, which later became a hurricane. It produced four flashes in just 100 minutes!
Learn more about what Fermi's discovered about gamma rays over the last 10 years and how we're celebrating its accomplishments.
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