MOSCOW, July 12, by Tatyana Pichugina. In Russia, the thunderstorm season lasts from May to September, peaking in July. And there are already the first victims. According to world statistics, lightning strikes claim thousands of lives every year. Scientists warn that the number of dangerous atmospheric phenomena increases along with the temperature on the planet.
Statistics have improved
In early summer, a tourist died in Adygea. The group went to the mountains on June 10, and the next day, when people were at the pass, the weather deteriorated, a thunderstorm began. One of the discharges killed the girl.
At the end of June, lightning struck a man in the head at a warehouse in Krasnodar. The cameras recorded the moment of his death — this video went around the Internet.
A few days later, on July 3, four people were injured in the Voronezh region at once — a thunderstorm found them in a field near a spring. According to the local center for disaster medicine, one woman died from lightning, another was hospitalized with burns, two children were hospitalized in serious condition.
These examples show how dangerous and unpredictable lightning can be. A powerful spark electrical discharge originates in a cumulonimbus cloud, as a rule, during a thunderstorm with a downpour, strong gusts of wind and thunder peals. Lightning strikes disable electrical and communications equipment, cause production downtime and data loss, fires in forests and settlements, and also, directly or indirectly, deaths.
Stats vary a lot from country to country. The maximum number of deaths is in the tropical and subtropical zones, where the density of lightning per square kilometer is the highest. In the United States, more people die from lightning than from all natural disasters, with the possible exception of floods.
No wonder the World Meteorological Organization included this phenomenon in the list of atmospheric disasters with the highest mortality rates — along with cyclones, tornadoes, hail. In 1975, a Zimbabwean hut was hit by a discharge that killed more than 20 local residents. A sad record was recorded on November 2, 1994 in the city of Dronka in Egypt: a fuel storage caught fire from a lightning strike, killing 469 people.
However, in the last hundred years, the number of victims has been declining. Scientists from Malaysia and the United States cite statistics for developed countries: if in the middle of the 19th century about nine people per million died from a lightning strike, then by the end of the century — three or four, and in the 1990s — less than one. Meteorologist Ronald Hall attributed this to the movement of population from villages to cities — as you know, lightning strikes most often in open areas, while fishing, working in the field or on pastures. The situation has been improved by the construction of large sheltered buildings, improved weather forecasts and warning services, training in thunderstorm safety, advances in medicine and improved communications.
Which lightning is the most dangerous and how to survive
Despite active research, there is still no unambiguous model for the formation of lightning. The streamer theory of electrical breakdown of gases is now generally accepted. Streamers are dimly glowing thin channels branching inside the cloud. When interacting, they can gather into a single trunk — a leader along which a sharply growing discharge moves. The plasma in the leader is heated up to several thousand degrees. Thanks to this, the discharge travels gigantic distances between the thundercloud and the earth's surface.
Lightning usually strikes an elevation, often a person serves as a point of attraction. Several mechanisms of injury have been described in the scientific literature. The most famous is a direct blow with atmospheric electricity in an open area. There is an opinion that it is always fatal, although there is no evidence for this. Another option is indirect contact through conductive objects, such as utilities or a metal fence. Recorded injuries while talking on a landline phone. Contact impact is estimated to be responsible for nearly 25 percent of deaths.
Another 30 percent is due to «side flash», when the discharge bounces off the original target and hits those nearby, for example, a person or a group of people hiding under a tree. The most destructive is the «step discharge», or «earth current»: lightning strikes the ground, and electricity, passing through it, strikes a person, even if he is far away. Approximately 10-15 percent of people die from being hit by an ascending streamer, when the discharge goes through the leader from the bottom up and the person standing in the way becomes a current transmission channel. Severe injuries up to death can be caused by a shock wave propagating from lightning as a result of a sharp plasma heating up to 30 thousand degrees.
The Ministry of Emergency Situations advises to follow the weather forecast so that a thunderstorm does not catch you in open space. And pay attention to the signs of the front approaching: high humidity, low-flying birds and insects, drop in atmospheric pressure, cloudiness in the morning, stuffiness, thunder.
From a thunderstorm, it is better to hide in a room or car, you can’t hide under trees, especially under oaks. If the weather caught in an open place, you need to find a recess and sit there, picking up your legs. It is necessary to get rid of metal objects, jewelry — to remove. Should not be in a group. You need to get away from the reservoir, as well as from the fire and power lines. =»1″ data-crop-width=»600″ data-crop-height=»600″ data-source-sid=»rian_infographics» class=»lazyload» lazy=»1″ />
The hotter, the brighter
In 1992, lightning physicist Earl Williams of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published an article in Science linking the amount of lightning to global warming. To do this, it is necessary to consider the surface and the atmosphere as a global condenser, where the convection mechanism is triggered — the mixing of surface air. The higher the surface heating, the stronger the convection and the more powerful the storms and thunderstorms (which, in fact, convert the mechanical energy of the movement of atmospheric masses into electrical energy). Charged ice grains in the clouds also play a role in the formation of the discharge.
According to Williams, with an increase in the average annual temperature by one degree, lightning activity doubles. Later, these estimates were refined more than once. Thus, for the United States, growth of 12 percent is predicted. data-crop-width=»600″ data-crop-height=»338″ data-source-sid=»nasa» class=»» />
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Recently, scientists from Austria calculated that the number of lightning in the Eastern Alps doubled from 1980 to 2019 . Changes are especially noticeable in the highlands: the lightning season now begins a month earlier, its peak is much more intense, and the maximum activity occurs in the second half of the day.
But according to the model of scientists from the UK, almost throughout Europe, lightning activity will decrease in the future — with the exception of high plateaus, the south of the northern countries, the British Isles and part of the Atlantic to the west. This will increase the likelihood of forest fires in the mountains and in the north. In winter, wind farms on the shores of the North and Baltic Seas will be at greater risk. According to the authors of the work, these new data give reason to reconsider the risks to people and the environment.