How Fast Does Lightning Strike At?

To understand how fast lightning travels, it first helps to understand first how lightning is generated. Lightning is created when an initial discharge of ionized air (a stepped leader), is created from a negatively charged region in a thunder cloud. The steeped leader proceeds down towards the earth in a number of large leaps, each up to 50 meters long, during this course, the stepped leader may branch off into a number of different paths. This is the longest part taking hundreds of milliseconds. When the leader is near the ground one or more smaller "positive streamers" arise from nearby grounded objects, this is due to the intense eclectic field created by the approaching steeped leader. Once the downward leader has meet the positive streamer the circuit is closed and the main stroke, or return stroke follows with a much higher current.
It is this return stroke that lights up the sky, and is usually gauged to travel in the region of 30 million meter/second. This however is not a universal figure as, the speed does vary from instance to instance, depending on the path that the stepped leader has taken and the state of the atmosphere when the circuit was closed.

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