What exactly is 'heat lightning'?

Question

I've heard the term used before, but I vaguely remember learning in high school earth science that there really is no such thing as heat lightning. can somebody please clear this up fo me.

Answer 1

From 1981

Dear Cecil:

For a long time I have been debating this point with friends: I say there is no such thing as heat lightning. I say it is just lightning occurring far off in the sky, and all we see is the glow from the bolt. Who's right? --Ed E., Chicago

Cecil replies:

You are, as long as you're not getting your heat lightning mixed up with your sheet lightning. Heat lightning, the sudden reddish glow you sometimes see on warm summer nights, looks the way it does (and sounds the way it does, i.e., silent) because of its distance from you, the observer. At its source, it looks like regular old blue-white lightning; what makes it appear reddish from a distance is the atmosphere's propensity for scattering light on the blue end of the spectrum, the same phenomenon that produces red sunsets.

Much more common than heat lightning, however, is sheet lightning, which is produced by a discharge within a cloud rather than one from cloud to ground. Here the electrical channel is obscured by a cloud, and all you see is a huge sheet of illuminated cotton, or whatever it is they're making clouds out of these days.

--CECIL ADAMS

Answer 2

Heat lightning (or, in the UK, "summer lightning") is nothing more than the faint flashes of lightning on the horizon or other clouds from distant thunderstorms. Heat lightning was named because it often occurs on hot summer nights. Heat lightning can be an early warning sign that thunderstorms are approaching. In Florida, heat lightning is often seen out over the water at night, the remnants of storms that formed during the day along a seabreeze front coming in from the opposite coast.

Some cases of "heat lightning" can be explained by the refraction of light or sound by bodies of air with different densities. An observer may see nearby lightning, but the sound from the discharge is refracted over his head by a change in the temperature, and therefore the density, of the air around him. As a result, the lightning discharge seems to be silent.

Answer 3

What is heat lightning?
Heat lightning is a name given to a flash in the night sky that occurs when there is a lightning-producing thunderstorm very far away from the observer. Since the storm is often so far away that the lightning bolt itself isn't observed, and the thunder isn't heard, the flash in the sky has received a special name. "Heat" probably refers to the fact that this kind of display is often observed on a warm humid night, after daytime heating has triggered thunderstorms -- just not near the observer.

http://www.weatherquestions.com/What_is_heat_lightning.htm

Answer 4

It is the name of a song from the movie Grease, ya know Heat Lightning! Seriously, heat lightning is the result of flashes of lightning in the far off distance. It usually occurs during the hot, hazy, humid days of summer. It's the same lightning you see above you during a thunderstorm, but you hear no thunder!

Answer 5

I lived in the desert in California and heat lightning is when u have clouds on a hot dry day. I possible rains but the air is so dry that it evaporates before it gets to the ground. This in tern causes tremendous up drafts and that in tern causes the so called heat lightning.

Answer 6

All lightning is the result of convection of air heated by contact with the warm ground, so all lightning is heat lightning.

Answer 7

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