Extreme weather – climate change makes it flash more often

An unusually violent storm moved to the Australian metropolis of Sydney on January 15. Their inhabitants are used to heavy rain and also floods, which lead to spontaneous floods, but the storm that moved across the city at the beginning of the year was spectacular and scary at the same time.

According to the Weatherzone Weather Service, 73,700 flashes within 100 kilometers around the city center of Sydneys were counted, whereby 8777 fell into the ground. The lightning strikes damaged trees and power lines, caused large -scale power outages and sparked fires. Another particularly violent storm was reported from the northwest of the state of Western Australia at the beginning of the year, a sparsely populated region that has also been hit by a violent cyclone in the past few days. According to the Accuweather weather service, a single thunderstorm near Port Hedland caused 15,000 lightning strikes within just three hours.

These storms over Australia were all particularly intense, but the associated lightning strikes did not remain unylines: According to the Australian meteorological service – the Bureau of Meteorology – over ten million lightning flashes have been counted over the continent since the beginning of January.

According to the Australian broadcaster ABC, the data made available by the Metraweather company based in New Zealand work with information from the Australian Lightning Network, which consists of more than 130 flash recognition sensors. The technology is specially designed to capture the electromagnetic frequency of a lightning strike.

Metraweather Managing Director Alex Zadnik told the broadcaster that the devices could notify lightning due to their electromagnetic frequency: “Sometimes you hear static noises in your am-radio when it comes to lightning strikes, and basically it is this electromagnetic frequency that capture the sensors.” Some sensors Lightning could recognize flashes within a radius of 500 kilometers as well as flashes that do not touch the floor. “Algorithms are used to determine whether a flash was high up in the atmosphere or whether it reached the ground,” said Zadnik. “So there is a bit of mathematics in the game, but the sensors give an indication of the amount of some of these events, and then an algorithm determines whether it is a cloud-to-cloud or cloud-to-floor.”

Especially in the state of Victoria, lightning strikes and in this case so -called dry thunderstorms have triggered several bush fires. According to the German Weather Service, one speaks of a dry thunderstorm when the entire rain evaporates in a very dry air mass between the lower border and the floor before reaching the ground.

For some time, researchers have known that climate change is accompanied by more lightning strikes. The number of flashes has increased, especially in developing countries in recent years. A study by the University of California in Berkeley published in 2014 showed that the warming will lead to 50 percent more lightning strikes by the end of the century. “We will have three on two lightning strikes at the beginning of the century at the end of the century,” said climate scientist David Romps at the time. The researchers found that the number of lightning strikes per degree of warming will increase by about twelve percent.

However, the researchers could not predict where or when this impacts will take place – and Australia was not highlighted as particularly endangered. “It could be that regions that today have many lightning strikes will have more of it in the future, or it could be that in the country parts that get very few lightning, many will be many in the future,” said Romps.

“We will have three at the beginning of the century at the end of the three.”

David Romps Climate researcher