In a year with news full of UN summits and celebrity spokespersons speaking out against climate change, further complicated by the emissions we as humans put out, new research says that the incremental changes over the next century may spark some more conversations as well as lightning strikes across the continental United States.
According to the study published this Thursday, Nov. 13, in the journal Science, researchers say that lightning strikes in the lower 48 U.S. states will increase by approximately 12% for every rising degree in the Earth's average temperature, potentially increasing lightning flashes as much as an estimated 50 percent by the end of the 21st century. And while lightning strikes may be a fascinating natural phenomenon to watch, the team highlighted warming temperatures and more moisture as not only being conducive to lightning strikes, but wildfires as well.
Lead author of the study, David Romps, says that lightning triggers nearly half of all wildfires in the continental U.S. And if climate change sparks more lightning in the coming years, then that may just set wildfires ablaze in the warmer world of tomorrow.
"Lightning plays an important role in atmospheric chemistry and the initiation of wildfires" Romps says. "But the impact of global warming on lightning rates is poorly constrained."
Although previous models were built around predicted cloud heights, the new study looked to include roughly 77% of the variance involved in lightning strikes, including wind movement, air moisture and atmospheric temperatures. And by looking into the exponential relationship of lightning prediction equations, the study's researchers hoped to attain far more accurate predictions out of the complex model.
"You need two ingredients to make lightning in a storm" Romps says. "One of those is that you have water in its three phases - vapor, liquid and ice - coexisting in the cloud. And the other is that the storm clouds be rising quickly enough to loft that liquid and ice into the atmosphere and keep it suspended. So we've built our proxy around those two ideas."
And while the study's new model may be far more accurate in predicting the frequency and presence of energetic lightning storms, researchers fear that far more variants make the possibility of determining potential wildfire areas a near impossible feat. Romps says that lightning triggers nearly half of all wildfires in the continental U.S. , and while the study won't be able to predict exact locations, they can see from the climate change model that wildfires are a likely looming threat of the near future.
"It could be that regions that already get a lot of lightning will get even more, or perhaps regions that don't get very much lightning now will be in store for more than they're used to" Romps says. "But it's certainly reasonable to speculate that with a 50% increase in lightning strikes, we'll have even more wildfires."
