In August 2019, something strange happened in the far north. Record breaking Bolt, who was attacked just 32 miles from the Arctic, is the closest strike ever recorded. “It was a crazy summer,” says Rick Toman, a climatologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks University.
It is common knowledge that thunderstorms and lightning are more likely to be higher when it’s hot than when it’s cold. They are more common in the tropical regions than in the Arctic. So the scientists wondered: The Arctic Circle was More electricity In our world of global warming, if so, what impact will it have?
Generally, a warm world is expected to become a stormy world. However, the exact impact of climate change on thunderstorms and lightning remains a question of scientific debate. Handling this down is important for many reasons. Worldwide, tens of thousands of people die from lightning every year. Lightning can either exacerbate or counter air pollution and climate change, causing chemical reactions in the air and has an incredibly powerful effect on the methane that warms the planet. And of course, lightning strikes are a key cause. Wildfirescan release carbon into the air that destroys the landscape and warms the planet.
Historically, “the Arctic Circle basically had no lightning bolts,” says an atmospheric physicist. “There are so many more now. It’s easy to see.”
So far, detection networks counting lightning around the world have found only vague hints of the global upward trend. However, the story is different in the North. There was a much more dramatic surge in the Arctic. Report The 80th parallel (passing the summit of Greenland) Northern lightning events began from about 100 per year in the early 2010s to over 7,000 in 2021. Historically, “the Arctic Circle basically had no lightning bolts,” says Robert Holzworth, a retired atmospheric physicist at Washington University in Shearton. “There are so many more now. It’s easy to see.”
Researchers are currently rushing to better understand how much lightning is increasing in the north and what it means for people, local ecosystems and the global climate. Will more lightning cause more fires, or will more rain be brought about by climate change? And what’s going on in the North, is it anomaly, or will it signal the change in the rest of the planet?
In 2014, David, an atmospheric scientist from Berkeley, California, became famous. Calculation Lightning could increase by about 12% per degree of global warming, and by 50% in 2100. This estimate is based on two major factors that have shown to be closely related to lightning in the US. More Rainclouds (water and ice particles collide with each other to create a charge) and more convection produce more lightning. But as scientists have looked at other factors, they have produced a broader lightning prediction.
One of these factors is theGlaupelIn the Clouds: These small soft bit clouds increase the cloud’s charge. Another factor is air pollution. The more the air gets dirty, the lightning bolts. 15%. In 2022, changes to shipping pollution regulations also caused huge things Reduction Lightning strikes the transport lane.
Due to all these complexities, lightning predictions often disagree with the fact that climate models usually struggle with small-scale phenomena such as thunderstorms. Some people predict that global lightning might be like that Reductiondo not increase. “There is a huge knowledge gap in forecasting future global lightning activities,” said Yuzhong Zhang, an atmospheric chemist at Westlake University in Hangzhou, China.
The World Wide Lightning Location Network records 600,000 to 800,000 lightning strikes every day around the world. Running since 2004, the network takes up very low-frequency radio waves created by lightning, bounces off the ionosphere and travels around the world. By detecting this signal at dozens of global stations and timing them within nanoseconds, researchers can triangulate where and when the lightning bolts attacked. wwlln (pronounced “wool”) only catches about 30% of the world’s lightning bolts and detects 80% of high-energy strikes, although lacking many small strikes. While other local or commercial networks catch more strikes, WWLLN has the longest and most consistent global dataset available to researchers.
New fire regimes in the north allow fire-painted wood seed corn to be incinerated rather than revitalized.
Jed Kaplan, Earth Systems Scientist at the University of Calgary, who shakes WWLLN data every year, says it was in 2022. There is no clear trend In global lightning data, he says, more recent data suggests hints for an overall increase. However, there are stronger signs in the Arctic. Holzworth’s 2021 study Of the data from wwlln, it was found that warm summers were hit with more lightning bolts from 2010 to 2020 than the 65th parallel (center of Alaska). This year in the stretch, 2019 (0.93 degrees Celsius warmer than the average of 1951-1980) saw triple lightning bolts as a slight lightning bolt in global total than the cooler year in 2011 (it was a 0.65 degree staircase). In other words, a 0.3 degree Celsius bump at Earth temperature tripled the Arctic lightning bolt.
It warns Holzworth that it is a single decade stretch, and it is not clear that this trend will continue. In fact, he suggests that his unused analysis has been a bit of lightning soaked in the Arctic over the last few years.
However, the Finnish weather company Vaisala, which runs its own Lightning Detection Network, has seen even more dramatic spikes in the far north. That 2022 Report Though the number of lightning strikes remains stable to the 65th parallel, researchers say in 2021 they saw a lightning event (including both lightning strikes that hit the ground) almost twice as much as the 80th parallel north lightning bolts than the total for the past nine years.
2015 Bogus Creek Fire burned the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
Matt Snyder / Alaska Forestry Department
Kaplan doesn’t always lead to more lightning bolts of fire. Fires require a lot of dry fuel to burn, not only ignites. Most of the lightning bolts are hit by the tropical regions, but heavy rain falls to prevent fires. In some places, including the United States, the majority of wildfires are initiated by human carelessness or malfunctioning equipment, rather than lightning. However, at high latitudes, increased Northern lightning activity is a source of concern, as lightning is the main cause of major fires.
The Alaska Fire Science Consortium is tracking what’s going on in Alaska. The peak fire activity there will occur in June. Long, sunny days dry out “duff fuel” and break down trash, lichen and moss, and lightning storms become more frequent hits. These conditions have increased in July. By the end of July, Alaska will tend to have more rain and reduce fires.
consortium 2025 Report Please note that Alaska is getting warmer. The summer average is over 54 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to about 52 degrees Fahrenheit in 1970. This is not fast enough to offset the effects of warming on fires. Lightning is on the rise. Over the past decade, lightning strikes in western Alaska interiors have doubled. “We know not only from our network, but also from the elders and middle-aged people, as well as locals who have noticed things are changing,” Thoman says. Much of Alaska has historically been too dry for lightning. Now they’re tilting their edges to have enough moisture in the air to form thunderstorms, Toman says.
One study predicts that lightning bolts could be layered by permafrost in 2100, with more than double the tundra and northern forests.
All of these factors led to a more frequent year of major eruptions in Alaska. “The big fire season is almost doubled with frequency,” Thoman said. Lightning plays an important role in that. In 2015, for example, Alaska saw over 50,000 strikes in three days (more than a third of the state’s annual average of 120,000 per summer), burning more than 5 million acres, experiencing the second-largest fire season.
Fire is a natural part of the northern ecosystem. But the new fire regime has a hotter fire, Thoman said. Thoman can incinerate fire-adapted wood seed corn instead of activating it. Burning the duff creates a huge amount of smoke. This is a problem for people living downwind. And burning of wood, which sometimes does not grow, can remove and speed up the shaded landscape The permafrost meltsreleases methane – a powerful greenhouse gas.
One recent study Thunder Strike predicts it could be more than 2,100 times more in the tundra and northern woodlands beneath permafrost. This, written by the author, could increase the area consumed by wildfires five times or more, and release a large amount of methane. Thawing permafrost is not very representative in climate models, so the amount of greenhouse gases that could be released in this way is unknown. “In my opinion, there’s not enough attention to this,” Thoman says.
Lightning strikes the Cocolic National Petroleum Reserve in northern Alaska.
David Shaw/Alaska stock
However, there is one reason to think that changing the chemistry of the atmosphere may help reduce the possible boost in methane.
In 2021, researchers flew through Colorado and Oklahoma to study the air during thunderstorms, and were surprised to find out what the strikes produced. Lots Oxidants – more than 1,000 times the amount they expected to find. These oxidants – hydroxyl and hydroperoxyl radicals – are known to scrape off methane and act like a kind of atmospheric cleanser.
As Zhang and his colleagues have learned by studying the inverse dynamics, the effect can be dramatic: a rapid increase in methane that occurred during Covid. team Calculation The global decline in lightning due to reduced traffic and air pollution during the pandemic caused a dramatic 2% global decline in hydroxyl in 2020 compared to 2019, while at the same time there was an increase in air methane per 15 parts in 2020. As for emissions, the lightning theory is strong. Chan estimates that about half of the spikes can be explained.
At the moment, no one knows the magnitude of which effect. If lightning strikes continue to increase in the Arctic and elsewhere, how much methane will it increase, or mop it up? Thunderstorms, according to Holzworth, play a very important role in moving ions and molecules into the atmosphere above, and the impact of their activities on climate change is complex and unknown. “These are pieces of puzzles that need to be solved.”
Holzworth, where there is now little lightning, “there’s probably more – perhaps even in Antarctica,” he says. “But that’s not that clear. The weather dynamics are changing.”
