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World Map of Lightning Activity

Posted by chrisd on from the maybe-not-a-good-night-to-fly-a-kite dept.

Ian writes "NewScientist.com is >reporting that you can now see the lightning activity on the entire planet Earth at one time. The article states, "The NASA map also shows that lightning very rarely occurs at sea and is almost never seen at the Earth's poles." Anyone care to speculate on why that is?"

2 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Re:My Estimation by Karma+50 · · Score: 1, Informative

    It could also be because they didn't take many measurements at sea and the poles! As evidenced by the fact that these regions are colour-coded grey & white which don't appear on the key.

    I'm sure you are right really ... I just thought it amusing that they're drawing conclusions from data that doesn't exist or at least isn't presented in the NS article.

    --
    http://www.thehungersite.com
  2. No lightning at the poles. by Yazeran · · Score: 3, Informative
    The reason for no lightning at the poles, is thet in order for a cloud to be electrically charged it has to be composed of droplets of liquid water. The current theory about how clouds charge is by colisions of drops in the cloud.
    Large drops falls through the cloud and collides with smaller drops going up. These collisions transfer charge from the down-going drops to the up-going drops, and thus a larde charge difference between top and bottom of the cloud develops. The large charge in the bottom of the cloud results in the formation of a 'mirror charge' in the ground beneath it and these charges are responsible for the lightning.


    Yours Yazeran


    Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.