The past few weeks have been marked by a number of thunderstorms. For millennia the cause of storms, especially the thunder clap and ...

Lightning, which can heat the atmosphere to five times the temperature of the surface of the sun, is the result of a powerful ...

A new experiment looking at clouds is about to change the way we think about climate change. For decades, scientists have thought that the tiny particles that form clouds — and play a big role ...

One kind of microbe, known as Methylobacterium, uses the energy in sunlight to break down organic carbon inside cloud droplets. In other words, these bacteria eat clouds.

And like on Earth, lightning often is generated within these clouds — an eerie sight spotted by various spacecraft, including Juno, that have visited our solar system's largest planet.

The formation of a sprite starts inside a thunderstorm. There, the exchange of electrons between colliding ice crystals and snow pellets produces distinct regions of electric charge within the cloud.