The lot next to where I live has a cell tower which gets hit now and then. It is ... way beyond.. loud. The last time it happened all my pets were in front of me within 10 seconds after, as if saying "Pardon sir, we are not programmed for this event! Please advise!".
The induced EMF in my long cables like cat-5 throughout the house and my outdoor observatory also takes out motherboards, DSL interfaces and ethernet adapters each time. These days when I hear thunder I start unplugging devices.
Lightning seems particularly tough on high frequency signal processing hardware. A lightning strike on an invisible dog fence the previous owners had left in place around our house fried, along with a couple of ethernet ports, every HDMI connector that was plugged in in one particular room at the time. Rest of the devices continued to function perfectly, but those HDMI input/outputs were cooked. Similar HDMI devices in another room were totally unaffected. My working theory is that the devices in the affected room were plugged in to multiple power sockets, giving a longer antenna loop through the sensitive components, while in the unaffected room all the devices were running off the same power strip. Would explain why ethernet - connecting devices in different rooms - also seems vulnerable.
Not much more evidence to go on, so it's largely superstition, but as a result I do generally try to keep my whole AV setup - game console, TV, AV receiver, etc. - plugged into a single power strip now.
I also now have a cat who is exceptionally nervous whenever he hears thunder. My wife and son were home at the time and... yes, the sound of a lightning strike at point blank is not just loud, it's.. like a crack in the world.
The 8-bit Guy had a video on this topic. He does a tour of his home wiring setup and talks about his previous setup was completely destroyed by lightning hitting a tree above a buried cable.
I was once walking along a soccer field in Costa Rica during the daily afternoon shower in the rainy season. Suddenly the entire sky beyond the treeline turned completely white. It was like I was looking at a black and white silhouette of the treeline. At the same moment I heard the loudest sound I've ever heard. It was like an explosion; I could feel the ground tremble. I have no idea how close the strike was, only that the sound and lightning were simultaneous from my perspective. It honestly could have been just on the other side of the trees across the field, or maybe half a kilometer away, I couldn't tell you. All I can say for sure is I ran like hell to the nearest house.
I'm not regularly around explosions and such so I've never experienced anything like that before or since.
This is the one thing that can be use to easily tell apart people who have been truly close to lightning, and those who only think they have.
Lightning is a powerful event and even if you're not that close to it, it can appear overwhelming and make you think you were much closer than you were. People who have experienced this talk a lot about what it looked like.
Everyone I know who has truly been close to a lightning strike unfailingly mention the sound above all else.
On a related note, I was in the middle of a major forest fire once. The sound was the most intense thing. Every time a slight breeze started blowing, a deep roar like a freight train filled your chest cavity.
Had a relatively close strike happen during a thunderstorm, a thunderstorm that was intense enough that we had to stop the car entirely as you couldn't even see the hood of the car through the waterfall like rain.
When the lightning struck the thunder felt instant. It was however clear from the admittedly blinding flash that it was still a ways off. Probably some hundred meters.
But as you said, the sound. In a car, in a torrent of rain, it was the loudest and sharpest sound I believe I have ever heard.
By the sound of it I could have sworn it was inside the car as couldn't tell it had been muffled at all by either the torrent of rain, or the bodywork and careful sound dampening in any modern car.
There had been lightning all around us for a while, but we barely heard the thunder of those strikes through the thunderous murmur of the sky falling down on us. The difference was truly astonishing!
I once was driving over an underground transformer when it exploded. A tremendous clap followed by a comparatively long and low hooting sound. Lots of vile smoke.
I was lucky to be in a car. A while back the same thing happened to someone walking over the top of a transformer causing very serious injuries.
I’m always kind of creeped out around iron grilles now.
Well I don't really know what group I fall into because I couldn't tell you how close I was. All I know is it was the loudest noise I've ever heard and I felt the ground shake. Never been in an earthquake so it's the also the only time I've ever felt the ground shake. But 50 meters? 500 meters? No clue.
Thunder is the sound that lightning makes, no? Unless I’m misunderstanding, the two things you’ve described are one and the same.
That being said, if you’re close—really close—the sound does change. Lightning used to regularly strike a pair of trees just outside my bedroom window when I was growing up, since it was the top of a hill, and the trees were the tallest thing around, by far. Were my window open, I could reach out and touch the taller of the two trees.
The sound is so loud and so abrupt that I’m not really sure how to describe it. It’s instantaneous—over before you realize that there was a sound. It’s not a steady, drawn-out rumble like you might expect. In addition to the overwhelming, deafening crack, sometimes I would hear what sounded like a scream or a whistle—but that was almost certainly just a sensory artifact and not a real noise. Other people in the house would describe different artifacts.
I probably make it sound scary, but I always looked forward to thunderstorms as a kid, and each time I’d hope the storm would get close enough to strike those trees. It was absolutely amazing to watch—and, being a child with no sense of danger, I’d sit right by the window.
I have been in a couple "close" strikes where the thunder was trailing the lightning by, maybe, a tenth of a second or so. Although they were several years apart, in both cases I distinctly heard—or maybe felt—a "pop" at the exact moment of the flash, similar to the sound of a high-power flash unit.
Maybe it was my imagination but it was so distinct that I wonder if it was the sound of discharge from nearby objects, or … something.
Both sound and light originate at the same time. Light travels faster than sound. If you are close to a strike, the time gap between lightening and thunder is smaller.
Cat-5 can definitely do it if you're unlucky about cable orientation and length. Years ago I worked in an office one story underground and the whole thing had a cable run along a single wall with drops. One day we got a nearby strike and every single ethernet card fried, but the rest of our hardware was fine.
Long ago I was inside of a church when its steeple got struck by lightning. We could hear the static building up in the sound system before the strike occurred. People said arcs shot from all of the power sockets. There were burn marks on every corner of every wall where it seemed the current couldn't make the sharp bend and jumped out of the metal within the walls. I just remember it being loud.
Years ago I was near a tree that was struck, but did not strike me.
It was like sensory overload, I remember hearing something, but not aware what and I found myself sort of crouched on the ground covered in tinyn (harmless) cuts and the tree bark that hit me.
I remember being aware of noise, but not a specific noise other than a sort of echo of it....and just knowing that a very loud noise had occurred.
Um, I don't know how often this happens but any chance of that damaging your hearing? Because I wouldn't know of any sound I'd even describe like that.
The part about it frying motherboards in your house makes me wonder how the cell tower copes with it. I assume it has a lightning rod but so close to that rod as the tower's equipment is, compared to how close your house is, it must fry everything on the tower? Do they come and replace all electronics on it every time?
I know that it needs time as well, but as the pressure goes up the time might become so short that you could get hearing damage from just that momentary bang. Especially if if's so loud that they describe it with words I would not know to apply to any sound. Hence my question.
> 13. This is just conservation of energy. The initial potential energy was mass times height times gravity. Divide by the 1/20th second that it "rings" out the pressure waves (the sound), and that is acoustic power. Divide by surface area of the toilet bowl lid to get energy flux.
Once I was on a plane that got hit by lightning, and the sound was quite frightening - an extremely loud, but short, bang. There were a few screams and many very worried glances around until the captain casually told everyone what had happened, and that everything was fine.
I live in the lightning capitol of North America. As an electrician, people ask me how to protect their personal property against lightning. After the usual spiel about lightning arrestors, and surge suppressors, I tell them clearly, there is no real protection against lightning. It goes wherever, unpredictably, and nothing can guarantee you or your possessions. The equipment I've described can lower your risk; that's all anything can do. I should make a recording of that speech.
If you get a solid strike, I would agree that almost all bets are off. At least unless you put some real money into it, but nothing that usually makes sense unless you are protecting really expensive equipment.
A friend of mine had a strike land somewhere snaking its way into his mains feed. I believe the feed was ~60 amp rated.
Anyway. At least 10 meters of the feed was simply gone. Except for some soot there weren't any more signs of either the junction box, or the electricity meter. It was as if they had never existed at all! Just gone.
Definitely. The Kennedy Space Center Assembly Building has an excellent lightning rod system and it dissipates charge before a strike damages the building. A pointed, metal, grounded stick is effective. But their system is custom engineered and expensive. And, while it's worked well for them, still no guarantees.
About KSC, my inside sales rep for Square D (the best switchgear) worked there for awhile. They needed a contactor, holding up a Shuttle launch, and the nearest one was at Square D HQ in Florence, KY, and could not be delivered today, no way. The KSC rep tells him to hold on. About 30 minutes later, he calls back, "Tell Florence to deliver it to the Guard base there. An F-15 will be on the flight line waiting on it." They do have cool stuff. And the Shuttle launch? It still got delayed.
As much as it's a fun story, I don't think an F-15 would be dispatched for such task, even on an emergency basis (unless they were bound to return to Florida).
Send in a C-12 and the job will get done. Unless you have, I dunno, less than 4h until the launch.
I did have a quick hunt around YouTube but I couldn't find any video of the March 2019 event. How disappointing, in the age of the security camera and dashcam!
Someone local to me was struck by lightning recently, whilst they were filming the storm on their phone from their porch. The phone screen is split, their arm hurts etc, but the film was recoverable. The lightning was just discernible as just a slight lightening on one frame, apparently. And a simultaneous clap. They were fine, and apparently it was the second time they were struck, although the first time was decades ago when they were caught out cycling.
> They were fine, and apparently it was the second time they were struck
we usually don't notice how insulated we are from the dangers of the elements in our modern lives. We even use "struck by lightening" in many "what are the odds" type of comparisons. But risk/luck is all about positioning and exposing yourself to it[1]. What are the chances of getting killed in a plane crash? A lot higher if you're a pilot.
Last year I spent several months in the wilderness trekking the Alps. The number of times I was scared shitless was much higher than normal. With every bad weather I had to make a decision of whether to camp under trees (and get killed by a falling branch) or by camping in a clear field (and get struck by lightening). Lying there in my tent and thanking god (which I don't even believe in) for my apparent luck. I pondered this a lot and thought about Roy Sullivan[1] constantly (and airline employees too).
>The lightning hit the top of his head, set his hair on fire, traveled down, and burnt his chest and stomach. Sullivan turned to his car when something unexpected occurred — a bear approached the pond and tried to steal trout from his fishing line. Sullivan had the strength and courage to strike the bear with a tree branch. He claimed that this was the twenty-second time he hit a bear with a stick in his lifetime.
> The lightning first hit nearby trees and was deflected into the open window of the truck. The strike knocked Sullivan unconscious and burned off his eyebrows and eyelashes, and set his hair on fire. The uncontrolled truck kept moving until it stopped near a cliff edge.
Trees attract lightening. Best to stay away from them during T-storms.
Most golf courses have thunderstorm sirens, when it sounds stop, drop everything, head for club house or lay flat on ground well away from trees.
The pro golfer Lee Trevino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Trevino was struck by lightening, so yes, it happens. Suffered back problems from the strike. I believe he lost a year on the tour.
> Trees attract lightening. Best to stay away from them during T-storms.
Yes, this is the common-sense advice: don't shelter under a tree. Yet I always wonder looking at all those trees around me standing there for 50-100 years.. how many of these were struck by lighting? Are many trees struck, but without damage showing, or were they just never hit? Maybe I could just shelter under them..
I've heard people who are struck by lightning once are way more likely to get struck again. Mostly it's probably due to the patterns and behaviors they have, but some stories it really seems like there's a sort of hidden effect of being struck by lightning. Probably just happenstance but part of me thinks it'd be interesting if being struck by lightning did cause some odd change. We could call it the lightning touch.
On a cursory glance it'd be interesting to know if this record mega-lightning event could be related to the magnetosphere type event mentioned in another HN story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23658114
They're on different dates but perhaps recording shifts in E&M balances based on global weather conditions, or perhaps affected by solar storms.
Can anyone give a simple explanation of why a lightning strike would travel so far laterally, rather than hitting the ground closer to wherever it started?
Good question!
I'm not entirely sure, but if we consider that: 1) Air is a decent insulator compared to earth 2) Most thunderstorms are quite close to the ground
3) The electric potential is caused by colliding masses of air.
I would have to assume a large volume of air gets a bulk charge that is large in a specific direction but not large enough for a strike to the ground. Then you get a breakdown somewhere that connects a lower potential are to a higher potential area, and because there is a bulk charge, the breakdown simply continues after this initial connection.
After that, I don't really get how it can continue for 16 seconds, other than massive amounts of charged in the atmosphere, and partially ionized leftover air from the initial blast being conductive enough to trigger more insulation breakdowns.
You can use electron beams to charge acrylic which you then trigger to discharge by various means, and it seems to behave in a similar way but on a much smaller scale. Iirc the small lightning bolts inside the acrylic sometimes continue for a surprising amount of time, even though it's tiny, and the flash also (generally) occur entirely within the insulator even it it's quite long and thin.
Just a guess, but normally lightning is caused by potential difference between the air and ground, so you roughly speaking have two potential surfaces/regions. For this to happen laterally, perhaps it would be enough to have three masses of air separated by two pressure fronts, with the interactions at the air masses' boundaries acting something like charge buildup across parallel plate capacitors. And then, dielectric breakdown happens.
I think the majority of lightning is cloud to cloud.
The big events I've seen/felt were at Cape Canaveral (happens every year), but I also saw the Dec. 2019 storm in Jakarta, which was accompanied by tornados - this one was so intense that adults were scared for their lives, a real fireworks display.
The WMO reiterated the dangers of lightning, and the many lives it claims every year.
Previous extreme examples have led to major loss of life: in 1975, for example, 21 people in Zimbabwe were killed when a single flash hit the hut in which they were sheltering"
That brick and stone house I'm in does not have any grounding as far as I know. However, I think the wet trees next to it will probably be a better conductor.
Well, proponents of the electric universe theory have an interesting explanation. First of all: lighting is not caused by clouds rubbing together. It is a result of the protective capacitance layer in the upper atmosphere leaking. Sprites are discharges from surrounding space across the ionosphere which trickles further down CAUSING thunderstorms and electric discharge to ground, or lightening.
Your conclusion makes no sense. I live Porto Alegre, city where this lightning was measured.
We always had this kind of phenomena, always a great spectacle. Lighting strikes a lot more here because of combination of factors: Relative flat terrain, no hills, and proximity with the ocean.
It's in the climate change section of the website. I can kind of see a cause and effect (but knowing very little about the topic this may be completely bogus): You add energy to the weather, clouds are bigger and winds are faster, and that translates to increased lightning.
Whilst you may see variations in area's, globally afaik the rate of lightning strikes hasn't changed at all, least I've not read anything stating that and if there was, I'd of thought that would of air publicly via the media decades ago.
Which is a shame as can imagine some types of people being a little more mindful climate wise if they got told that the odds of them getting killed by lighting will increase due to their actions. Alas that is not the case, shame as make things easier to communicate to those that need such communication.
But we are still learning about lightning, indeed I also would of thought extra particulate matter in the atmosphere would see more friction and with that lightning and that does not appear to be the case as clear cut and no hockey stick lighting rate increase globally.
Though of interest and related would be lightning formed by certain volcano eruptions, which does give some weight to extra particulates would make an increase in lightning, but then, we just don't see that globally and shows how much we don't know still about lightning. Let alone space lighting, which we didn't even know about a few decades back.
The only explanation offered in the article is that we have better technology for detecting these events now. It's irresponsible to link it to climate change, even though the link is superficially plausible.
> “Environmental extremes are living measurements of what nature is capable of, as well as scientific progress in being able to make such assessments”, he added.
> “It is likely that even greater extremes still exist, and that we will be able to observe them as lightning detection technology improves.”
Increased thunderstorms is a fairly straight forward consequence of more heat in the atmosphere. Thunderstorm formation is basically enormous thermals/dust devils that keep growing. More heat == more vigorous thermals == more thunderstorms if the atmosphere is primed to create thunderstorms. Yes there is more to it, cumulus clouds form, convection sets up, etc, but the basic mechanism of a heat source triggering a convective storm is pretty well developed.
Obviously there are a lot of variables at play so it wouldn't surprise me if there are not well conducted studies at this point.
> 'Most previous studies project an increase in global lightning with climate change over the coming century, but these typically use parameterizations of lightning that neglect cloud ice fluxes, a component generally considered to be fundamental to thunderstorm charging. As such, the response of lightning to climate change is uncertain. [...] In contrast to the previously reported global increase in lightning based on CTH, we find a 15% decrease in total lightning flash rate with IFLUX in 2100 under a strong global warming scenario.'
> 'Many published analyses show that lightning activity is responsive to temperature on time scales ranging from the diurnal to the decadal. The hiatus in global warming is manifest in several global datasets in the decadal period 2002–2013. The statistically flat behavior of the global lightning record from the NASA Lightning Imaging Sensor over the same period is consistent with this hiatus in global warming.'
Absolutely, it is quite likely bogus. I would love to know if the website really meant to connect this to climate change, and if so what the mechanism is.
What is needed is a graph of global lightning strikes increasing inline with global temperature rise and that does not exist, afaik - globally lightning strikes have been consistent year on year. But nowt jumping out google wise and would of thought if lighting increased, we would know. Equally if the strength of lightning increased, that would also be measured and known.
However there is data of lightning in some area's increasing, others less so and does seem to balance out, but not clear cut data set to know for sure upon that one.
The induced EMF in my long cables like cat-5 throughout the house and my outdoor observatory also takes out motherboards, DSL interfaces and ethernet adapters each time. These days when I hear thunder I start unplugging devices.