Roughly 75% of the entire planet's tornadoes are reported in the United States.
Here, unique geography is ultimately responsible for the high frequency of extremely powerful storm cells.
Though tornadoes most often make the headlines, all this excessive energy in the atmosphere
can result in a freak show of other wonders.
Many of the phenomena we are familiar with.
And others we're still just discovering.
Not only is Mother Nature's fury amplified with these explosive storms
So is her beauty
Storm updrafts most frequently erupt near late afternoon when daytime temperatures reach their highest.
This rainbow is caused by the reflection, refraction and dispersion of sunlight in rain droplets.
The secondary rainbow is visible when light that is reflected twice inside raindrops is bright enough for detection.
And because this light is reflected twice, the order of its colors are reversed.
The concentrated downdraft of heaviest rain and hail is the core.
This icy waterfall often has a turquoise hue.
In the evening or morning when golden hour sunlight mixes in, the storm can turn an eerie green.
In a wind sheared environment, cell updrafts may rotate becoming a mesocyclone.
This mesocyclone is the defining character of the rarest and most violet breed of thunderstorms...
The supercell!
And it's these super cells that are responsible for the majority of the world's violet tomatoes.
(Really awesome music)
(intense wind howling)
Thankfully, most of these tornadoes occur over sparsely populated areas causing little destruction if any.
Sometimes two tornadoes occur at once.
Sometimes more.
that was three burritos on the ground.
By separating pools of positive and negative charges.
Thunderstorms have the ability to create electric fields. When oppositely charged regions become strong enough...
A flash of lightning temporarily equalizes the difference.
Most flashes occur within the storm,
But roughly one in five initiate by a downward moving stepped leader that connects to the ground.
Oh, Bam! Got the Tree!
The tree is on fire.
The more powerful the thunderstorm,
the less time needed for the regions to rebuild their energetic charges.
This is real time! I am not time-lapseing. I'll pan the camera so that you can see...
constant flickering of lightning.
This is unbelievable. If you look out the field to you'll see fireflies. Wow!
On rare occasions lightning initiates from tall objects on the ground and propagates upward into the storm.
During extraordinary events two or three ground-to-cloud flashes occur.
And during extremely rare conditions,
Over a dozen bolts of lightning can leap up into the sky.
Near the ceiling of our troposphere,
Pouch-like mammatus clouds hang underneath the storms anvil cloud.
High above the thunderstorms
Mysterious large-scale discharges burst into color.
Scientists call these
Transient luminous events