Study finds as world warms, US gets more lightning WASHINGTON — Lightning strikes in the United States will likely increase by nearly 50 percent by the end of the century as the world gets warmer and wetter, a new study says. While those conditions were already known to promote thunderstorms in general, the new work focused on lightning strikes themselves. Researchers calculated just how much lightning flashes increase as air warms, clouds fill with more energy from water vapor and rainfall intensifies. They concluded that for every degree Fahrenheit the world warms in the future, lightning strikes will go up nearly 7 percent. That’s 12 percent for every degree Celsius. Because scientists forecast that the world may get about 7 degrees warmer (4 degrees Celsius) by the end of the century, based on current carbon dioxide emission trends, that comes to a 50 percent increase in lightning strikes, said David Romps. He’s the atmospheric scientist at the University of California Berkeley who led the study. “When you used to have two lightning strikes, now you’ll have three,” Romps said. “It’s a substantial increase.” The researchers based their calculation on 2011 weather data from across the U.S. They presented their results in a paper released Thursday by the journal Science. [...] newsinca/study-finds-as-world-warms-us-gets-more-lightning-2/
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 19:31:03 +0000
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