New study could help improve protection standards for lightning in the US

 

Previous studies determined that lighting is one of the most frequently occurring natural hazards in recent times. A new study could help officials tackle lightning flashes with better preparation.

The National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN) recently investigated the number of cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning flashes in a new research. 

Data to improve standards
The study noted that the number of CG flashes over the contiguous US (CONUS) has been estimated to be from as small as 25 million per year to as many as 40 million. In addition, many CG flashes contact the ground in multiple places. 

As per the data, researchers estimated the average to be roughly 23.4 million flashes per year over CONUS. The ground point average number was estimated to be 36.8 million per year.

This information could help improve the standards for protection against lighting in the US and areas worldwide that are potentially likely to experience occasional lightning flashes.

Furthermore, the study also noted that researchers executed sensitivity tests to check the impact of misclassifications in CG and in-cloud (IC) lightning.

Learning such details could also help understand the effects of lightning on forest fire initiation, geophysical interactions, human safety, and various applications, ultimately helping improve actions for such scenarios.

Ground strikes over CG flash vary with the location
The authors stated: “Sensitivity tests to assess the effects of misclassification of CG and in-cloud (IC) lightning are also made to place bounds on these estimates, and the likely uncertainty is a few percent.”