Maxum, Don't worry, you're not looking like an idiot - You're probably doing a lot of "silent people" a favor because weather is not portrayed very accurately in mainstream media (either too dumb or too complicated,) and the way science is often taught usually makes most people afraid to try to learn it. All this, while science, especially meteorology/climatology, are having drastically bigger effects on our world thanks to a combination of weather- and people-related factors.
For anyone else out there who may be afraid of learning weather because they're not "science-minded people", let me confess now that I'm right-brained, picture-oriented, a photographer/writer... My attempt at college meteorology wasn't successful in the mid-90s. The teaching was all numerical and I wanted pictures. In 2000, all that changed (I was most grateful!) Everything became available as pictures. It became all online too, no more need for a NOAA sattellite dish on your roof in order to look at maps that individuals previously didn't have access to (even off-duty meteorologists at home). The picture representation of weather stuff has just kept getting better and better... before you know it, we'll have "Animated Hi-Def Meteorology in 3-D IMAX". Popcorn, anyone?
What's this mean to you right-brained people? Consider it an advantage, if you want to learn meteorology. Traditional meteorology uses equations to describe how things move and interact, but I have found that a picture-driven mind with a mental movie projector often arrives at very similar conclusions once trained to "see" the way weather moves and interacts with the land. I've expressed this to friends who are number-minded meteorologists who said they often wished they could just imagine a weather animation without the help from a graphics program on a screen. Nobody has to be special in order to understand this stuff but rather, find their own individual ways of understanding it.
Now, to the question about Thunderstorms. They are tiny little areas of low pressure. Whenever one passes over my station I always notice a pressure drop followed by a pressure rise. ANY area of rising air is causing the pressure at the ground to lower, because when air takes off and goes somewhere else (up) it leaves a vacancy at the ground. If all the people on the MOUNT go up above decks to look at the lake, the "people pressure" below decks will get a lot lower. Granted, in the atmosphere air can and does spread out after it rises, unlike the people, who are limited to the ship.
Anyway... the point is that thunderstorms are very localized areas of rapidly rising air. The most severe thunderstorms will even develop their own counter-clockwise rotation/circulation. Those things are fierce.
To get rising air like that, we usually need heat to create or combine with an unstable air mass in order to make the thunderhead. This instability of the air is called "Dynamics." When T-storms rely on a combination of heat and dynamics, It would be fair to call these storms "Warm core" because heat is a necessary part of their balanced diet.
HOWEVER.... Like people in anarchy, thunderstorms can play by their own rules. If they don't have heat, they can still rely on dynamics alone-- a situation I'll describe as "Conditions that cause air to rise as though it was hot, even though it's not." Whenever that happens, it's an indication that the weather system is on steroids. Such was the case with "Thundersnow" that so many people saw during the Blizzard of '78.
The ones that produce hurricanes need heat. Hurricanes need a lot of heat, and a lot of open water, in order to develop their classic pinwheel structure. When they move over land, they get ripped apart by friction with the land... and when they move over cold water, they *usually* lose enough of their "tropical genetics" so they have to be reclassified as "Extratropical" instead of "Tropical." The difference is like eastern coyotes vs. western coyotes. Very similar, but if you put them next to each other you'd start to see the differences.
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