Weather Facts:

Did you know? : A lightning stroke begins with a faint predischarge, called the leader, which goes from the cloud to the ground. The leader establishes a path for the highly luminous return stroke (what you really see) which propagates from the ground up to the cloud. The first stroke of a flash is usually preceded by a "stepped leader", so called because it appears to progress in discrete steps (about 100 segments, each 50 m long) from cloud to ground. The subsequent strokes are preceded by a "dart leader" which smoothly follows the path of the previous return stroke (and is about 10 times faster).