Higher frequency of thunderstorms that bring lightning have a link with global warming
The higher Alps, where lightning activity was found to have amplified, experienced more pronounced heating than rest of Europe. Photo: iStock Lightning activity in the higher European Eastern Alps doubled in the 2010s compared to the 1980s, according to a new study.
Warming in the Eurpean Eastern Alps and surrounding regions is more pronounced than the rest of Europe. Some scientific models have predicted that climate change can be a factor behind the increase in lightning activity, making it a good indicator of the climate crisis.
More lightning strikes occur in the higher Alps than the rest of the landscape and the lightning season also begins a month earlier, the scientists wrote in the report published in the journal Climate Dynamics.
The researchers from University of Innsbruck, Austria observed:
During the day, the peak is up to 50 per cent stronger, with more lightning in the afternoon and evening. Similar signals along the southern and northern edges of the Alps are present, but weaker. The flat areas around the Alps show no significant trend.
"Our analyses over this terrain have now shown that the rising temperatures due to climate change are causing the frequency of thunderstorms and thus lightning to increase even further. The fact that this trend is so clearly in line with global changes in the climate system also surprised us," said co-author Thorsten Simon, department of mathematics, University of Innsbruck, to Phys.org, a science website.
Cloud-to-ground lightning strikes are harmful in many ways. One, they can cause power outages by damaging electricity supply infrastructure. Two, they can spark fires at the sites they strike. Finally, people may get injured and even be fatally struck by lightning.
Apart from immediate damages, lightning also injects air pollutants like NOx and ozone into the atmosphere and threatens permafrost, according to the researchers.
The scientists analysed the annual average number of days with thunderstorms since 1979 to establish the trend. Thunderstorms always come with lightning and, like extreme weather events, have been made more frequent and intense across the world by climate change.
The topography of mountainous areas already makes them more prone to thunderstorms. Moreover, melting of ice that covers these terrains has exposed larger areas to heating.
Such anomalies will only become more common in a warming world, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and almost every meteorological prediction model have estimated.
The relationship between climate change and lightning is still not very clear and the researchers hope the findings of their research will shed some light on the subject.
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