Tabs on Lightning
Listen in RealAudio
Email your weather question
Lightning strikes the United States over 20 million times a year and scientists can track the location and strength of every single bolt. It's called the National Lightning Detection Network.
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is The Weather Notebook.
Only about 20 percent of lightning hits the ground but when it strikes, it strikes hard. In the United States, 75 to 100 people are killed every year by lightning. Hundreds more are injured.
Lightning also sparks half of all forest fires, torches over 30,000 homes and fries over 100,000 computers a year. Power utilities are especially hard hit. Lightning causes thirty percent of electric outages, costing companies almost one billion dollars a year.
That's why, in 1983, the utility industry funded a project to track cloud-to-ground lightning. By better understanding the spectacular phenomenon, they hoped to better protect their electrical generating and transmission equipment. Six years later, the National Lightning Detection Network blanketed the nation, monitoring every lightning bolt touching down in the continental United States.
The sensors use antennas to detect lightning the same way AM radios can pick up bolts in a thunderstorm. The sensors record the location, strength and polarity of each strike. The computer coordinated network has recorded almost a quarter of a billion flashes since it was born.
The network is now run by a private company that sells the information to the National Weather Service, local weather stations, the airline industry and power companies. You can check out current lightning conditions around the US at their website which is www.lightningstorm.com.
In case you're wondering, central Florida between Tampa and Orlando is the nation's lightning rod. In this corridor, lightning strikes some square mile areas more than 20 times a year.
Thanks today to writer George Homsy ("Home-zee") of Canadaigua, New York The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mt. Washington Observatory and is supported generously by Subaru of America.