tastyintestines
Justified & Ancient
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Kondoru said:How are they caused?
http://gawker.com/photos-capture-exact- ... 1501795683Photos Capture Exact Moment Woman Was Struck Dead by Lightning
A photojournalist was at the right place at the right time to capture the worst possible outcome for a woman standing on the beach during a thunderstorm.
Photographer Rogério Soares was snapping photos of the stormy coast of São Paulo state for Brazilian daily A Tribuna, when he spotted a 36-year-old tourist Rosangela Biavati running toward the beach.
He managed to take a single photo of the woman before she was struck and killed by a lightning bolt.
That, too, was caught on Soares' camera.
According to A Tribuna, Biavati and her companions ignored warnings that were clearly in place against approaching the water.
But a climatologist who spoke with Globo's G1 news portal said those warning often aren't enough.
"People are really anxious about going to the beach and don't listen to safety recommendations," said Rodolfo Bonafim. "Ideally the place should be cleared, and entry should be forbidden during a thunderstorms."
Rio's Christ the Redeemer statue's thumb chipped in storm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-25791938
The Christ the Redeemer statue surrounded by lightning
The statue's arms have a span of 28m (92 feet)
A lightning strike has damaged a thumb of Rio de Janeiro's famous Christ the Redeemer statue.
The thumb on the right hand of the 38m (125ft) statue was hit during a storm on Thursday night, officials said.
Officials from the Archdiocese of Rio, which manages the statue, told Brazilian media that repairs will be made to the statue soon.
It is visited by nearly two million people ever year and in 2010 underwent a $4 million (£2.7m) restoration.
Thursday's storm had one of the highest numbers of lightning strikes recorded in Brazil since the country began monitoring storms in 1999.
The National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) told O Globo that the statue is struck by lightning on average between three and five times a year.
The monument was inaugurated on 12 October 1931 on top of Rio's Mt Corcovado and is considered the largest Art Deco-style sculpture in the world.
Lightning bolts near the Christ the Redeemer statue
Thursday's storm reportedly saw more than 40,000 lighting flashes
The statue's right hand
Church officials told Brazil's O Globo that the thumb had been struck by lighting before
Youths carry the World Youth Day cross during a visit to the Christ the Redeemer statue
The statue is one of Brazil's most iconic landmarks
Are lightning deaths increasing?
By Navin Singh Khadka
Environment reporter, BBC World Service
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26554974
Lightning near Rio de Janeiro
In Brazil lightning strikes are increasing - and so are the casualties
Lightning appears to be killing and injuring increasing numbers of people in developing countries, meteorologists and experts say.
The total casualties could even be higher than other weather-related disasters like floods, landslides and droughts.
"The frequency of lightning has somehow increased from what it used to be," says Michael Nkalubo, commissioner at Meteorological Department of Uganda, a country where lightning storms are common.
"I cannot say that a study has been carried out on this but I am saying this on the basis of my general observation.
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There may be more people killed or injured by lightning than most other natural hazards”
Prof Colin Price
Tel Aviv University
"It is something increasing every year and we think this is a manifestation of climate change but we also need to establish whether deforestation has also contributed."
South Africa is another country in the African continent where lightning-related deaths and injuries are or the rise, officials say.
In South East Asia too experts believe lightning incidents and casualties are going up.
"It is a growing problem in the region," said Hartono Zainal Abidin, a lightning protection expert in Malaysia.
"Lightning incidents are indeed going up and so are the deaths and injuries but the problem is many countries in the region including Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand don't even have proper experts and so the issue is left unaddressed."
Meteorologists in South Asia have also noticed the trend.
"My observation is that in the last few years, we have seen increasing cases of lightning," said Shamsuddin Ahmed, deputy director of the Bangladesh Meteorological Department.
"Of course, it is not a big disaster like cyclone, but we cannot ignore it and we should take up special programmes to study this phenomena."
Scientist Osmar Pinto Junior of Brazil's National Institute for Space Research said lightning in Brazil and other parts of Latin America has been on the rise and so have the casualties.
Meteorologists from the developing world say lightning incidents and their impacts remain under-reported as they are sporadic, making them difficult to record.
Some scientists believe that, with the increase in global temperature, thunderstorms and lightning will grow more common.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the supreme authority in climate science, has said: "It is generally expected that lightning will increase in a warmer climate, although a study for the 2030 climate finds no global increase but instead a shift from the tropics to mid-latitudes."
Professor Colin Price, a lightning and climate researcher at Tel Aviv University, says climate models show about 10% increase in lightning for every one degree of warming.
Lightning in Montana
Lightning is increasing even though thunderstorms are not - a perplexing trend
More than a hundred lightning bolts hit the earth every second, experts estimate, and more than 70% of those take place in tropical and sub-tropical regions.
Prof Price said: "The underdeveloped world is where you have the maximum frequency of lightning and thunderstorms - in places like the Central African Republic and DR Congo, the Amazon region of South America, the Indonesian islands and Borneo in South East Asia.
"When you add the figures up, there may even be more people killed or injured by lightning than most of the other natural hazards we have on the earth today."
Meteorologist Ron Holle, who works for a Finnish company Vaisala that makes weather equipment, also said lightning fatalities were high in Africa.
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Under a changed climate scenario there will be more lightning”
Prof Giles Harrison
University of Reading
"In the last 10 years our finding in Malawi, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and some parts of South Africa is that the lightning fatality rate is what it used to be in the US 100 years ago.
"We have seen a major reduction, to almost a zero, in the developed world. In contrast, in the developing world, people still are involved in labour intensive agriculture and are living in houses that have no lightning protection.
"So it is mainly a population and lifestyle issue."
Professor Price agreed that rising population is a factor.
"We passed the seven billion mark last year so there are more people out there who can be hit by lightning.
"We cannot separate the climate and population effects. But, whatever is happening, the observations on the ground are correct that there are more and more deaths and injuries due to lightning."
Not all scientists agree with that.
"I haven't seen the statistics to show that actually the total number of deaths or events from lightning is increasing," says Prof Robert H Holzworth of the University of Washington, who also heads the World Wide Lightning Location Network that has about 80 detection stations.
London Eye struck by lightning, July 2013
"What we found was that in the last several years, the number of thunderstorms in the world seems to be relatively stable. But the number of lightning strikes we are detecting with our network has been zooming up.
"And that's because we are more efficient at detecting lightning and not necessarily because there is more global lightning."
Experts say the science of lightning is quite complicated.
"Under a changed climate scenario there will be more lightning but there is a sort of paradox between drier environments where there will be more lightning and less rain," said Giles Harrison, professor of atmospheric physics at the University of Reading.
"So maybe what happens is we get much more explosive thunderstorm events which will generate a lot of lightning but overall our rainfall rates are not particularly changed.
"Droughts associated with El Nino seem to be also associated with increases in lightning and that's the contradiction and the paradox to think about. It's not a simple picture."
Experts say politicians and policy makers' indifference to the subject has not helped either.
"They immediately respond to disasters that impact many people at the same time," said Prof Arun Kulshrestha who heads the Centre for Science and Technology of the Non-aligned and Other Developing Countries.
"The total lightning casualty figure may be more than that of other disasters but they are always in ones and twos, so politicians' positions are not at stake and governments don't fall."
Enlightened forest
Luis Barrucho
BBC Brasil
The replacement of the forest by urban areas has been causing an increase in the lightning activity in the Amazon region, Brazilian researchers suggest.
According to a study led by scientist Osmar Pinto Junior of Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, the city of Manaus, in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, has seen a 50% rise in lightning strikes in the past 30 years, reaching a current rate of 13.5 strikes per km² per year.
Looking at satellite images, Mr Pinto Junior and his team have found that, over the city, the lightning activity is larger than that in neighbour regions.
"Our results indicate that such changes have been caused by what we call Urban Heat Island (UHI)", he said.
"While in the last three decades the surface air temperature in the tropics has increased by approximately 0.4C, it has increased by 0.7C in Manaus."
Pinto Junior explains that this phenomenon occurs when green areas are replaced by buildings and other urban features, pushing the temperatures up and prompting more lightning storms.
Although "very likely", he says, it is still unclear whether the lightning enhancement has been causing more fires in the Amazon forest.
The research was published in the American Journal of Climate Change in December.
It's when you're 'earthed' you're most at risk - then the electrical current from the lightning can pass through you to the ground and kill you.krakenten said:And God be thanked that all on board were safe!
Smoke billows across Waterbeach area as large straw stack struck by lightning on former RAF base burns
Written byCHRIS HAVERGAL
Stack fire at former barracks in Waterbeach. June 7, 2014.
A large stack of straw went up in smoke after being struck by lightning.
Two fire crews from Cambridge were called to the former barracks and RAF base at Waterbeach at 7.10am today after smoke was spotted billowing across the area.
A fire service spokeswoman said crews discovered a stack fire involving a “large quantity” of straw.
She said: “The stack fire appeared to have been struck by lightning.
“Firefighters are at the scene currently working with managers on site to control the fire and contain it.
“We will be monitoring this incident throughout the day. We anticipate being here for a number of hours.”
monops said:We've got a huge haystack fire going on near our village - it was struck by lightning yesterday morning, and both ends of the stack are alight. All they can do is control it and wait until it burns itself out.
Smoke billows across Waterbeach area as large straw stack struck by lightning on former RAF base burns
Written byCHRIS HAVERGAL
Stack fire at former barracks in Waterbeach. June 7, 2014.
A large stack of straw went up in smoke after being struck by lightning.
Two fire crews from Cambridge were called to the former barracks and RAF base at Waterbeach at 7.10am today after smoke was spotted billowing across the area.
A fire service spokeswoman said crews discovered a stack fire involving a “large quantity” of straw.
She said: “The stack fire appeared to have been struck by lightning.
“Firefighters are at the scene currently working with managers on site to control the fire and contain it.
“We will be monitoring this incident throughout the day. We anticipate being here for a number of hours.”
Read more: http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Cambrid ... z343WyTvlv
BOGOTA (Reuters) – A lightning strike in a small indigenous village in mountainous northern Colombia killed at least 11 people who were participating in a community ritual, the army said on Monday.
The incident, which occurred near the town of Guachaca in Colombia’s Sierra Nevada mountains, left another 13 people seriously injured. The region is home to several indigenous communities.
“A group of indigenous people were participating in a traditional community meeting and a bolt of lightning struck, leaving 11 dead and 13 injured,” Colonel Jorge Santo Domingo, head of a nearby army unit, told Reuters. ...
Read more at http://newsdaily.com/2014/10/lightning- ... EfAzVJi.99