During a lightning storm, what happens to the electrons in the clouds and on the ground?
435891
they conflict to eachother.
108122
http://science.howstuffworks.com/lightning.htm
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Actually, there are 3 kinds of lightning strikes:  Cloud to cloud, Ground to Cloud and Cloud to ground.  So the answer to your question is yes.
1056436
Let me answer this way:  The static charge built up between the clouds and earth (ground) cause the air between to become ionized (lightening) causing a discharge of (usually) millions of amperes of current, neutralizing (minimizing) the charge.\n   And as you know, an efficient arrestor is designed to prevent any great voltage rise during the discharge.
382607
Lightning is an electric current. Within a thundercloud, many small bits of ice bump into each other as they swirl around in the air. All those collisions create an electrical charge, just like the one that builds up in you when you cross a carpet.\n\nAfter a while, the whole cloud fills up with electrical charges (usually with a negative charge closest to the earth). Since opposites attract each other, that causes a positive charge to build up on the ground beneath the cloud. The ground's electrical charge concentrates around anything that sticks up, such as mountains, lone trees, people, or even blades of grass. The charge streaming up from these points eventually connects with a charge reaching down from the clouds, and--zap!--lightning strikes.\n\nThe intense heat of the lightning bolt causes the surrounding air to explode outward with a gigantic boom--thunder.
342819
In the process of the water cycle, moisture can accumulate in the atmosphere. This accumulation is what we see as a cloud. Interestingly, clouds can contain millions upon millions of water droplets and ice suspended in the air. As the process of evaporation and condensation continues, these droplets encounter many collisions with other moisture that is in the process of condensing as it rises. Also, the rising moisture may collide with ice or sleet that is in the process of falling to the earth or located in the lower portion of the cloud. The importance of these collisions is that electrons are knocked off of the rising moisture, thus creating a charge separation. \n\nThe newly knocked-off electrons gather at the lower portion of the cloud, giving it a negative charge. The rising moisture that has just lost an electron carries a positive charge to the top of the cloud. Beyond the collisions, freezing plays an important role. As the rising moisture encounters colder temperatures in the upper cloud regions and begins to freeze, the frozen portion becomes negatively charged and the unfrozen droplets become positively charged. At this point, rising air currents have the ability to remove the positively charged droplets from the ice and carry them to the top of the cloud. The remaining frozen portion would likely fall to the lower portion of the cloud or continue on to the ground. Combining the collisions with the freezing, we can begin to understand how a cloud may acquire the extreme charge separation that is required for a lightning stroke.
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electrical discharge in the atmosphere
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This is taken from an article I used with my earth science students.\n\nOver 1,000 people get struck by lightning every year in the United States, and over 100 of them die as a result of the strike. Lightning is not something to toy with. \nIf you are caught outside in a storm, always look for appropriate shelter. Do not take any chances -- lightning can use you as a path to the earth just as easily as it can use any other object. Appropriate shelter would be a building or a car. If you do not have anywhere to go, then you should avoid taking shelter under trees. Trees attract lightning. Put your feet as close together as possible and crouch down with your head as low as possible without touching the ground. \n\nNever lay down on the ground. After lightning strikes the ground, there is an electric potential that radiates outward from the point of contact. If your body is in this area, current can flow through you. You never want the current to have the ability to pass through your body. This could cause cardiac arrest, not to mention other organ damage and burns. By making your body as low to the ground as possible and minimizing the amount of your body in contact with the ground, you can lower the possibility of a lightning-related injury. If a strike were to occur near you, the current would have a much more difficult time flowing through your body in this position. \n\nIf you are indoors, stay off the phone. If you must call someone, use a cordless phone or cell phone. If lightning strikes the phone line, the strike will travel to every phone on the line (and potentially to you if you are holding the phone). \n\nStay away from plumbing pipes (bath tub, shower). Lightning has the ability to strike a house or near a house and impart an electrical charge to the metal pipes used for plumbing. This threat is not as great as it used to be, because PVC (polyvinyl chloride) is often used for indoor plumbing these days. If you are not sure what your pipes are made of, wait it out.\n\nA couple of misconceptions:\nRubber tires keep you safe in a car because they do not conduct electricity.\nNope. In strong electric fields, rubber tires actually become more conductive than insulating. The reason you are safe in a car is because the lightning will travel around the surface of the vehicle and then go to ground. This occurs because the vehicle acts like a Faraday cage. Michael Faraday, a British physicist, discovered that a metal cage would shield objects within the cage when a high potential discharge hit the cage. The metal, being a good conductor, would direct the current around the objects and discharge it safely to the ground. This process of shielding is widely used today to protect the electrostatic sensitive integrated circuits in the electronics world. \n\nThe tallest objects in a storm always get struck by lightning.\nIt's true that taller objects are closer to the clouds, but as discussed previously, lightning can strike the ground at a close distance to a tall object. Taller objects may have a higher possibility of a strike, but where lightning is concerned, the strike path is not predictable.
15170
Lightning creates thunder, by rapidly heating the surrounding air. The heated air expands explosively and compresses the air immediately around the heated area.
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A given cell of a thunderstorm goes through three stages: the cumulus stage, the mature stage, and the dissipation stage.\n\nIn the cumulus stage of a thunderstorm cell, masses of moisture are pushed upwards. The trigger for this can be solar insolation heating the ground producing thermals, areas where two winds converge forcing air upwards, or where winds blow over areas of high ground. The moisture rapidly cools into liquid drops of water, which appears as cumulus clouds. As the water vapour condenses into liquid, latent heat is released which warms the air, causing it to become less dense than the surrounding dry air, and so the air will tend to rise in an updraft due to the process of convection (hence the term convective precipitation). This creates a low-pressure zone beneath the forming thunderstorm. In a typical thunderstorm, some 5×108 kg of water vapour are lifted and the amount of energy released when this condenses is about equal to the energy used by a city (US-2002) of 100,000 during a month.\n\nIn the mature stage, the warmed air continues to rise until it reaches existing air which is itself warmer, and the air can rise no further. Often this 'cap' is the tropopause. The air is instead forced to spread out, giving the storm a characteristic anvil shape. The resulting cloud is called cumulonimbus incus. The water droplets coalesce into heavy droplets and freeze to become ice particles. As these fall they melt, to become rain. If the updraft is strong enough, the droplets are held aloft long enough to be so large that they do not melt completely as they fall and fall as hail. While updrafts are still present, the falling rain creates downdrafts as well. The presence of both updrafts and downdrafts during this stage can cause considerable internal turbulence in the storm system, which sometimes manifests as strong winds, severe lightning, and even tornadoes. If there is little wind shear, the storm will rapidly 'rain itself out', but if there is sufficient change in wind speed and/or direction the downdraft will be separated from the updraft, and the storm may become a supercell.\n\nFinally, in the dissipation stage, updraft conditions no longer exist, and the storm is characterized largely by weak downdrafts. Because most of the moisture has precipitated out, there is not sufficient moisture in the lower air to sustain the cycle and the thunderstorm
1077150
Thunderstorms are an occurrence of high pressure and low pressure. When the two zone converge they create ionization of the atmosphere, that is an electrical charge one is positive and the other negative, with the ground being ground. As the two systems get closer to each other, the disruption in the atmosphere caused the discharge of positive electrons across the pressure zones creating a static discharge in the form of lightening, most of the time the lightening strikes from positive to negative between the clouds, however many times the discharge is so massive it goes to ground. Thunder is the sound the lightening makes as it breaks the sound barrier of approximately 720 mile per hour when flashing between positive and negative poles.
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To quote my source page:\n\n============================================================\nIs lightning ever seen during a snow storm? \n\n\n (100%, 2 ratings) submitted by Alatea (A, 93%, 2508 ratings), Oct 11, 05 \n\n(Answer last edited on Jan 28, 06)\nThe answer to the question of whether or not there can be thunder and lightning during a snowstorm is this. It is possible but it is quite rare. Here's why. \n\nA thunderstorm depends on rapidly rising moist warm air to produce the effects we see. These effects are, large volumes of rain in a short period of time, strongly gusting winds, hail, and of course lightning. When conditions aren't right (surface air is too cool and dry) it is impossible for air at the surface to rise fast and high enough to create a thunderstorm cell. Basically in winter the air is not warm or moist enough to produce thunderstorm cells.\n\nhttp://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/dec96/844703853.Es.r.html\n============================================================
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Lightning does occur during snowstorms, it is just much rarer.\n(I have personally witnessed it.)\nI believe it does not occur as much, as the theory of lightning is that it builds up electricity from friction at the molecular level. However, in the extreme cold of a snowstorm, it would take a much greater amount of friction to generate enough electricity for lightning to form.
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buildings do not reach into ionosphere. Surface of eath has zero charge (hence grounding). Lightning goes  from a cloud to the ground, or into another cloud. \n\nAll tall buildings have lighning protection, i.e. a thick metal wire going from top-most point and into the ground.
1120246
Actually, electrical charges from the ground meet charges from the sky.  We  live in a magnetic field of 219v-dc.   Charges build up in clouds and are attracted to charge harbored within the earth.
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Clearing a few things up:\nlightning can go from cloud to ground, ground to cloud, or cloud to cloud.\nThe charge buildup that causes the lightning is focused in the cloud and on the ground.  But the lightning doesn't go from one to the other and just stop.  The difference in charge becomes large enough to cause a "jump" between the air and ground (or whatever the source/target).  This is like an arc in an electrical current... the voltage builds up to a point where the inhibition of the atmosphere (or wire covering) aren't enough to contain it, cuasing the ions to jump from the one place to the other.  As an aside, lightning is caused by opposite charges building up.  Typical lightning is negative (negative charge flowing to positive charge).  Less common is positive lightning, which is much more powerful/damaging.  The -/+ ions flow to the opposite charge.  Lightning starts wth a stepped leader of particles "reaching out" from the source AND target until a path of low enough resistance is found at which time the lightning strikes.  The path is set and large amounts of ions flow along the path until the charge difference/voltage decreases to a point at which the resistance restrains the flow again.\nThe lightning doesn't stop at the ground when coming from the cloud... it keeps spreading out until the charge difference is neutralized/the energy dissipated.  This can lead to lightning ions travelling large distances into the ground (or along underground phone lines and such).\n\nTired of me talking?  Looking for a point?\nThe point is that you can be hit in the sky!  Partciles of air aren't directly grounded either, but the lightning goes through them.  Humans are less resistant than air (that's why being the tallest object in a thunderstorm is dangerous), so in theory you are the easier path.  And just because you aren't grounded doesn't mean you don't get burned as the lightning passes through you (just as it would if you were grounded).\n\nDoubt the danger is rediculously extreme, but its a threat.
341077
I believe they are refering to sheet lightning that never touches the ground. In the tropics it can be extremely brilliant lighting up the sky like a neon glow.