Smoke, haze and near to record temperatures will stick around the region for the foreseeable future. Light morning winds and mild afternoon breezes will do little to flush out the smoke already in the region, and the dominating ridge of high pressure is showing no signs of going anywhere anytime soon. Low triple digit highs on Thursday will ease back into the mid to upper 90s by the weekend.

So what are the ingredients that go into the creation of lightning (either cloud to ground or cloud to cloud)? What occurs in both cases is the vertical motion of the strong updrafts creates a separation of electrical charges…. Positive on the tops of the clouds, and negative on the bottom. Envision a giant Duracell Battery and you’ll get the general idea. On a cloud to ground strike, the negative charge on the bottom of the cloud induces a positive charge on the ground, and since nature abhors big imbalances like that, there is a discharge to neutralize the electrical potential. The cloud to cloud does essentially the same thing, but the negative bottom of one cloud discharges into the positive top of another.