Showing posts with label Lightening Strikes Multiple times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lightening Strikes Multiple times. Show all posts

Saturday, 18 April 2015

Map! Lightening Does Strike More Often than you Imagine


Forget what you've been told, lightning definitely does strike twice.

Around the planet, lightning strikes around 40 to 50 times a second, and depending on where you live, you could be in for a whole lot more action.

NASA's Earth Observatory has just released a map that shows where lightning flashes most often, and it reveals that lightning is far more likely to occur over land than water, and is also much more common near the equator.

So which spots on Earth receive the most lightning strikes? That would be Lake Maracibo in northwestern Venezuela, and the far eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, both of which are located close to the equator.

In Lake Maracibo, Reuters reports that there are lightning storms 300 days of the year.

This new map compiles data taken over a much longer time period than previous efforts to map Earth's lightning strikes, the researchers explain.

"The longer record allows us to more confidently identify some of these finer details," NASA scientist Daniel Cecil said in a NASA press release.

Read more here