Talk:Lightning

Major content review and improvement

Now that a substantial restructure is complete, I am making an initial review of content, section-by-section. I will note proposed changes in this discussion.

in Formation: Atmospheric phenomena in which lightning occurs

1. Add paragraph: "As well as the thermodynamic and dynamic conditions of the atmosphere, aerosol (e.g. dust or smoke) composition is thought to influence the frequency of lightning flashes in a storm. A specific example of this is that relatively high lightning frequency is seen along ship tracks."

in Formation: Charge separation in thunderstorms

1. To end of paragraph beginning "The differences in the movement of the precipitation cause collisions", add sentence: "This is normally referred to as the non-inductive charging mechanism." This is a pretty key term to note, as its thought to be the primary cause of charging in storms.
2. In the final paragraph of this section, add: "These positive-negative-positive charge regions are typical of mature thunderstorms, and referred to as the tripolar charge structure.
3. Change "The result is that.." to "Typically". Charge structures can differ.
4. This section is combining both microphysics aspects and large-scale charge separation. Maybe that's ok, but it's possible the large-scale separation might be better explained in the establishing an electric field section.

in Formation: Electrical discharge as flashes and strikes

1. is "as flashes and strikes" needed in this heading. I guess it makes it more approachable?
2. This paragraph seems to be slightly off point. I would remove and replace with a paragraph that one acknwoledges that this section focuses on CG strike as it has been more widely studied, but aspects of the description will be relevant to other kinds of flash. And then a bulleted list of components might be helpful, along the lines of that at the start of the Formation section?
3. Positive flashes have already been described in the new structure so remove "...which are explained later in the article"

DecFinney (talk) 21:29, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

Completed: point 1 above of Atmospheric phenomena in which lightning occurs, and points 1-3 above of Charge separation in thunderstorms. DecFinney (talk) 17:00, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

Completed kind-of: I considered point 4 above in Charge separation in thunderstorms. I decided that the non-inductive charging process is kind of dependent on the large-scale considerations as well, so didn't seperate the microscopic from macroscopic processes. Instead, I adjusted the section intro bullet points to better refelct the content of that subsection. However, if someone wants to split microscopic and macroscopic processes I would not object. DecFinney (talk) 16:01, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

I have taken my major review of the content as far as I care to at this time, finishing with some fairly substantive edits to the detection section. I will now look to draw in other experts to review and improve the page. DecFinney (talk) 15:13, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

👍🙂 Thanks for al of the good work you've been putting in. DiscreetParrot (talk) 13:56, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for your initial engagement with my review, it really motivated me to see it through.

I'm happy that the page has been improved somewhat. I hope some other experts will be motivated to critique it further, but we'll see.

Questions for you:

1) Do you know how to tidy up this Talk page? i.e. archive some threads. I've put quite a lot of material on here, which I would now say does not need to remain.

2) Do you have any opinions about how the page should be improved next? (perhaps one for a separate discussion) DecFinney (talk) 09:31, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

No problem. :)

1) Yes. To manually archive a discussion you have to open both the talk page and an archive page in edit mode, copy and paste to the archive page, save it, then delete the original. Archives are "subpages" of the talk page URL, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lightning/Archive_1. A talk page can have more than one archive subpage. You can move discussions to an existing archive if you feel that's most appropriate (ignore the 'do not edit' warning which is really about not changing existing archived content rather than adding to the archive), or you can create a new archive by visiting the corresponding URL and then using the 'create' option (top-right). An archive page's contents should start with the {{Archive}} template. You should have a read of this: Help:Archiving_a_talk_page

The widget at the top of the talk page can be set up to give a list of links to all existing archives. It seems we actually already have three archives for this talk page but they're not currently being listed for some reason. (Now fixed).

It's also possible to set up talk pages for automatic archiving. In fact looking at the source content of this page, it already is set up to automatically archive discussions after 100 days of inactivity. Though it seems to be configured to leave at least four discussion threads unarchived.

2) Not at the moment. DiscreetParrot (talk) 17:59, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

Proposed restructure

Section "Electrical discharge as flashes and strikes" and its six subsections are too detailed for a wikipedia reader. Shorten the text and simplify the language. 129.247.247.239 (talk) 10:17, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

@129.247.247.239 I agree. i would welcome specific suggestions or bold editing on that section. DecFinney (talk) 09:49, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

Improvement of figures

In the section "Charge separation", Fig. 1 and Fig. 3 don´t represent the reality (thunderstorms have both up- and downdrafts and not rain below the entire thunderstorm). A more suitable figure could look like Fig. 1 presented on a NOAA page, which in addition to precipitation also includes the charging: https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/lightning/types/ 129.247.247.239 (talk) 11:12, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

@129.247.247.239 thanks for flagging this. i see what you're saying.

the nasa one doesnt clearly show the tripole structure though, which i think is what's needed for a general audience.

i just about prefer the existing images to the nasa one but I'll keep an eye out for something better to propose. DecFinney (talk) 09:48, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

Reference to be added

In the section "Impact of climate change and air pollution": add to the last paragraph and after "formation of nitrogen oxides (NOx)" the following reference: Schumann, U. and Huntrieser, H.: The global lightning-induced nitrogen oxides source, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 7, 3823–3907, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-7-3823-2007, 2007. 129.247.247.239 (talk) 11:21, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

done DecFinney (talk) 07:14, 9 June 2025 (UTC)