Static Electricity:

Charge carriers, principally electrons, can make up or become deficient on objects without flowing anywhere. You have experienced this whenever walking on a carpeted floor during the winter or in a place where the humidity is low. A surplus or shortage of electrons is formed on and in your body. You obtain a charge of static electricity. It is termed as static as it does not go anywhere. You do not feel this until you touch some metallic object which is connected to an electrical ground or to some big fixture, though then there is a discharge, accompanied by a spark and a little electric shock. It is the current, during the discharge that causes the sensation.

When you were to become much more charged, your hair would stand on end since every hair would repel each other one. Objects which carry similar electric charge, caused by either a surplus or a deficiency of electrons, repel each other. Whenever you were massively charged, the spark may jump numerous centimeters. Such a charge is hazardous. Static electric (also termed as electrostatic) charge buildup of this magnitude does not occur with ordinary carpet and shoes, fortunately. Though, a device termed as a Van de Graaff generator, found in several high-school physics labs, can cause a spark in large. You have to be careful whenever using this device for physics experiments.

On the grand scale of the Earth's atmosphere, lightning takes place among clouds and among clouds and the surface. This spark is a greatly magnified version of the little spark you get after shuffling about on a carpet. Until the spark takes place, there is an electrostatic charge in the clouds, among different clouds, or among parts of a cloud and the ground. In figure shown below four kinds of lightning are shown. The discharge can take place within a single cloud, among two different clouds, or from a cloud to the, or from the surface to a cloud. The direction of the current flow in these situations is considered to be similar as the direction in which the electrons move. In the cloud-to-ground or ground-to-cloud lightning, the charge on the Earth's surface obeys all along underneath the thunderstorm cloud like a shadow as the storm is blown along by the existing winds.

The current in a lightning stroke can move toward 1 million A. Though, it occurs only for a fraction of a second. Yet, many coulombs of charge are displaced in a single bolt of lightning.

Figure: (a) Lightning can take place within a single cloud (intracloud), (b) between clouds (intercloud), or between a cloud and the surface (c) cloud to ground or (d) ground to cloud.