Lightning Safety Awareness Week 2008

Posted by jns on 24 June 2008

Yesterday I had a press release from NOAA letting me know that this week, 22-28 June, is “Lightning Safety Awareness Week”. Apparently it is the seventh such declared week. The motto of LSAW comes from the mouth of Leon the Lion: “When Thunder Roars, Go Indoors!”

The National Weather Service, operated by NOAA, maintains a Lightning Safety Website that is filled with useful information and other interesting lightning-awareness stuff. For instance, there is a nice gallery of photographs of lightning, whence came the dramatic photograph at right, taken by Harald Edens near Socorro, NM, 2003 (used by permission).

On the home page, towards the bottom, there is a near real-time map showing lightning strikes in the continental US (and bits north and south) over a two-hour time period (delayed, they say, about 30 minutes after the data were collected).

We learn that each year in the US an average of 62 people are killed by lightning. Of those,

• 98% were outside
• 89% were male
• 30% were males between the ages of 20-25
• 25% were standing under a tree
• 25% occurred on or near the water

We are told that lightning can strike from storms as far away as ten miles, which is why the NWS advises “When Thunder Roars, Go Indoors!” There really are no safe places to be outdoors. Either go inside a “safe building” or get inside a completely enclosed car (with metal roof). A “safe building” has walls with electrical wiring and plumbing, the latter being conductors that can get charge from a lightning strike into the ground instead of into people. Open shelters in parks, for example, are not “safe buildings”. Naturally, there’s more complete information around the NWS website.

Needless to say, perhaps, but my attention was drawn by two pages: “Lightning Science” and “Statistics and More“. Woo hoo!

From “Lightning Science”, lots of fun lightning facts:

• At any given moment, there are 1,800 thunderstorms in progress somewhere on the earth.
• There are lightning detection systems in the United States and they monitor an average of 25 million flashes of lightning from the cloud to ground every year!
• Ice crystals in a cloud seem necessary lightning, which may result from charge separation that takes place in collisions of ice crystals.
• Lightning is a rather complicated process for discharging negative charge in the cloud.

“Statistics and More” has several interesting sounding things like interesting lightning events in history, details on lightning deaths, policy statements, factsheets, and guidelines. Links can be so much fun sometimes.

My own awareness was increased this week by the rather dramatic thunderstorms we had last Sunday night, and again on Monday night, when Isaac and I were out and we both saw a brilliant stroke of lightning.