lightning is enigmatic and the internet facing community surrounding its research seems divisive can anyone speak to the sort of research currently being done

lightning is enigmatic and the internet facing community surrounding its research seems divisive can anyone speak to the sort of research currently being done on the study of lightning and its initiation? are there efforts to recreate assumed initial conditions? thoughts on the source of the huge amounts of directed energy? does the strike harvest from the vast collection of charged particles within the cloud or is it created by electrostatic interaction of individual ions, similar to http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/v7/n3/full/nchem.2161.html http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/v7/n3/full/nchem.2161.ht...?