Lightning & climate

This event can be watched at Queen Square or online – please select the correct tickets when booking.

The World Meteorological Organization recently declared lightning flashes to be an Essential Climate Variable. This declaration elevates lightning flashes to a climate quantity that is currently mainly assessed by lightning imagers on satellites and ground based lightning detection networks. Lightning flashes are generated by thunderstorms which develop when hot and humid air leads to atmospheric instability and upper atmosphere dynamics enables deep convection to occur. The majority of all lightning flashes occur in the continental tropical belt around the globe. The primary lightning climatology follows solar insolation with a longitudinal migration that corresponds to a diurnal variation and a latitudinal migration that corresponds to an annual variation. In this talk, the speaker will explore the phenomenon of lightning flashes as a diagnostic tool for key driving processes of climate variability and their contribution to positive feedback.

Dr Martin Fullekrug, Dept of Electronic and Electrical engineering, University of Bath

Image credit: Oscar van der Velde – www.lightningwizard.com

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