Lightning

[TheBigDog]

When I was about 15 I was out swimming in someone's pool who was not home when a thunderstorm rolled in. As I went running home the front edge of the storm menaced over and the really big raindrops started to smack down hard on everything. As I was across the street from home a tree in my yard got struck by a lightening bolt. It exploded with bark shooting off in all directions. While the tree didn't fall, it died and we had to bring it down later on.

Across the street our neighbor was in his yard bringing in some stuff from doing yard work. When the bolt struck the tree in my yard he was knocked down and out, and didn't come to for several minutes. He assumes he was hit by the lightening, but showed no physical signs.

The attached picture shows where everything happened. I am the blue x running toward the green x (front door). The red x is where my neighbor woke up. And the yellow x is where the tree used to be that took the hit. The fact that I was in the wide open and it hit on both sides of me is as close as I have come to getting hit by lightening.

And for those really detailed Hypo junkies, the brown circle is where I built one of the treehouses I have pictured in the gallery.

Bill

[Turtle]

Keep those great stories rollin'! Speaking of rolling & lightning, we have thunderstorms rolling up from the South. The noon news from my location near Portland Oregon reported 2,500 lightning strikes in Southern Oregon in the last 24 hours resulting in 250 small fires.
I may have an opportunity to tape more lightning tonight, and in the mean time there is some learning to do on lightning detectors they use to compile the maps of location & number of strikes.
Detailed Description:
http://www.nwstc.noaa.gov/METEOR/Lightning/llp.htm

[TheBigDog]

Speaking of lightening detectors. I saw documentary on lightening a few years ago where they had this machine that detected lightening all over the globe. And they used the rate of strikes to measure the global temperature. When the temp goes up, so do the strikes. I have never heard of this being applied to global warming studies. Is there merit to it, or was it just hogwash that I was watching?

Bill

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by TheBigDog

Speaking of lightening detectors. I saw documentary on lightening a few years ago where they had this machine that detected lightening all over the globe. And they used the rate of strikes to measure the global temperature. When the temp goes up, so do the strikes. I have never heard of this being applied to global warming studies. Is there merit to it, or was it just hogwash that I was watching?

Bill

I haven't heard of this before; I'll keep an eye out in the related links.
Meanwhile, we need to differentiate between lightning "detection" and lightning "prediction". This link from a lightning prediction equipment company gives some pertinent facts, but I don't see that they mention the specific type and/or design of the equipment.
http://thorguard.com/faq.asp
Possibly "field mills" ?
http://www.kvi.nl/~stokroos/projects.../fieldmill.htm

[InfiniteNow]

Somewhat tangential, but analogous... Lightning is within each of us at all times with every moment. Within the synaptic clouds, chemically induced electrical strikes occur always. On a neurodendritic scale, these storms are wildly intense, and generate gobs of power inducing signal transmission and propogation of information for everything from moving to basic survival functions. We are not only on the earth, not only part of the earth, but just like it too.


I wonder what thunder would sound like in such an environment. Maybe another thread for another time though...


Why is lightning so prevelant in Tampa Bay? Is there a reason for this that anyone is aware of? Heck, they see so much lightnighg, they've named their hockey team after it.

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by InfiniteNow

Why is lightning so prevelant in Tampa Bay? Is there a reason for this that anyone is aware of? Heck, they see so much lightnighg, they've named their hockey team after it.

The SE United States sees a lot of lightning because it sees a lot of thunderstorms. These occur due to the warm moist air from the Gulf and Atlantic ocean moving North and West which collide with the colder dry air moving South and East across the US with the jet stream.
The area in the Midwest US called "tornado alley" is a result of the same collisons, but moved inland because of seasonal effects.
Here's a nice little guide from the National Oceanic and Atmosphereic Administration (NOAA):
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/brochures/ttl.pdf

[Turtle]

No lightning in my immediate vicinity, however the region continues to receive thousands of lightning strikes. The 2 day total for Oregon & Washington is now at over 14,000 strikes and we have thousands of acres of forest ablaze. Here is a local report on a 400+ acre fire near Mt. Hood, about 45 miles SE of my location in Vancouver USA.
It makes one wonder how lightning caused fires behaved before fire suppression efforts began in the region some 200 years ago.

[Jay-qu]

Heres my take on it:
Well if there was no fire suppression than everynow and again the forest would be cleaned out, so these days the forest is partly protected and allowed to build up fire fuel. When the fires do eventually happen they end up bigger than the natural ones that happened more frequently years ago.

[Boerseun]

Originally Posted by Jay-qu

Heres my take on it:
Well if there was no fire suppression than everynow and again the forest would be cleaned out, so these days the forest is partly protected and allowed to build up fire fuel. When the fires do eventually happen they end up bigger than the natural ones that happened more frequently years ago.

This is indeed a big problem. People make regular fire breaks and end up preventing 'natural' fires for years on end. Problem is, a lot of plants have adapted to this, to such an extent that quite a few plants' seeds can't germinate until they've burnt. Sorta like stomach acids do to fruit pips. If you want to make those seeds germinate that was designed to go through an animal's gut first in order to get widely distributed, you need to soak it in vinegar first. But I digress.
After vegetation have 'built up' beyond the natural two- or three year burn cycle time, when it does burn, it burns a heck of a lot hotter than it would have done, ending up killing all the seeds that were to germinate after a 'cold' fire. The fire obviously kills the host plant, but the seeds were designed to survive. To survive a 'cold' fire, that is. This practice of creating unnatural firebreaks might even be detrimental to the survival of quite a few species of plants, I imagine.

[Jay-qu]

Yup, funny story of a few years ago.

I was in one of our national parks and I found a bird that was injured, its wing was twisted and bent backwards, it couldnt fly and seemed to be in pain. So after chasing it around for a bit I finnally caught it in bucket and took it to a park ranger. When I got to the ranger he told me that he would do nothing for the bird because there they like to 'let nature take its course' I was fairly disgruntled by this but could do nothing about it. We tried to feed the bird and left the bucket in a protected place for the night, but in the morning it was gone.
The next day after that when we where leaving we saw the rangers and also some fire men, doing controlled burns of some of the park. And I thought to myself.. "so much for letting nature take its course"