Light shed on lightning

[dArKeR]

They say lightning never strikes the same place twice, but scientists have found it tends to strike some areas more often than others.

For the last five years, a national grid of 83 lightning detectors has monitored millions of lightning flashes across the country, allowing Environment Canada to map hot spots, where bolts are most frequent.

The Alberta foothills, the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border and southwestern Ontario are all major targets, as is an ocean south of Sable Island, which is a magnet for winter lightning.

Since lightning strikes start well over half the forest fires in Canada — including many of the terrible blazes that have ravaged British Columbia this year — the findings can help foresters pinpoint the risk areas.

http://theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030903.wlite903/BNStory/National/

Sorry, we're a little busy spending our money and resources on murdering Muslims around the world. We don't have time for this kind of research unless we can use it to kill people.

[slackmaster]

1. I don't see any profound revelations here

Where I live (Southern California) it's especially obvious that lightning hits some places more often than others. All of the mountaintops in the peninsular ranges get frequent monsoon thunderstorms in the summer, but areas near the coast rarely experience lightning. Florida gets a lot more lightning than the California coast. In New York City the Empire State Building gets hit about 100 times every year and the Flatiron Building hardly ever.

Severity of storms gets affected heavily by local topography. Since storms tend to come from the same sources year after year and the lay of the land changes very slowly, it makes sense that lightning would favor some spots over others. Mapping them out makes sense in terms of public safety and fire risk assessment. I'm surprised this work wasn't done a long time ago.

:shrug: