Question

11a) A heavy summer rain has just spoiled a fun game of frisbee between you and your friends. As you rush to leave, a bolt of lightning strikes a tree on the other side of the field. Lightning is a form of electrical discharge that occurs when the electric field in a region between the ground and the clouds ionizes the air. You happen to know that a bolt of lightning can unleash about five hundred million joules of energy, transferring about 20 coulombs of charge between the earth and the sky. Out of curiosity, you decide to estimate the magnitude of the associated voltage difference by assuming that the field between the ground and the clouds is approximately uniform. b.) You estimate that the lightning travelled along a vertical distance of about a 2 miles. Approximately how strong is the corresponding electric field? c.)The ground and the clouds in the sky can be crudely approximated by a parallel plate capacitor model. What would the areas of the plates have to be for this model to recreate the charge and field strength in the scenario? Assume that the plate separation corresponds to the separation between the ground and the clouds.

Answer 1