Amazing stuff! Remember Benjamin Franklin and his kite!
"A new study shows how often lightning strikes and how it behaves, often hitting the ground with multiple strikes from the same flash."
"... Lightning flashes in thunderstorms at least 60 times per second somewhere around the planet, sometimes even near the North Pole. ...
Lightning kills or injures about 250,000 people around the world every year, most frequently in developing countries, where many people work outside without lightning-safe shelters nearby. In the United States, an average of 28 people were killed by lightning every year between 2006 and 2023. Each year, insurance pays about US$1 billion in claims for lightning damage, and around 4 million acres of land burn in lightning-caused wildfires. ..."
Lightning kills or injures about 250,000 people around the world every year, most frequently in developing countries, where many people work outside without lightning-safe shelters nearby. In the United States, an average of 28 people were killed by lightning every year between 2006 and 2023. Each year, insurance pays about US$1 billion in claims for lightning damage, and around 4 million acres of land burn in lightning-caused wildfires. ..."
From the abstract:
"The number of cloud-to-ground (CG) flashes over the contiguous U.S. (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 more than one place. To clarify these values, recent data from the National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN) have been examined since the network is performing well enough to make precise updates to the number of CG flashes and their associated ground contact points. The average number of CG flashes is calculated to be about 23.4 million per year over CONUS, and the average number of ground contact points is calculated as 36.8 million per year. Knowledge of these two parameters is critical to lightning protection standards, as well as better understanding of the effects of lightning on forest fire initiation, geophysical interactions, human safety, and applications that benefit from knowing that a single flash may transfer charge to ground in multiple, widely-spaced locations. 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."
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