What is a Thunderstorm

Many people can sense when the weather is building toward the dark clouds, lashing rain, forks of light, and cracks of sound, that make a thunderstorm.
It starts, most often on spring or summer day, with warm, moist air.
This warm, moist air rises above cooler air, sometimes nudged upward by a sea breeze or cold front.
As the warm air rises, its vapor condenses into liquid droplets to form clouds.
The condensing gas gives up heat, which warms surrounding air.
This warm air in turn pushes upwards.
As the atmosphere becomes unstable, vertical motion increases.
The cloud gets taller and taller until it forms thunderhead.
Though its mushroom like shape is not always clear from the ground, a thunderhead can reach several miles in height.
Near the top of the cloud mass, droplets get bigger and heavier and eventually fall as rain or hail, accompanied by rushing downdrafts of colder air.
Meanwhile, close by, warm updrafts continue to lift small droplets to great heights.
Amid the turbulence, water particles collide, knocking negative charge electrons from rising particles.
In this way an electrical field forms within the storm; the bottom is negative charged, and the top is positively charged.
Zap! Lightning hits the air to more than 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit in less than a second.
This causes in the lightning channel to expand explosively, violently compacting the air around it—a disturbance called a shock wave that our ears here as thunder.