This could have negative consequences in the form of flash floods, wild fires, or damage to power lines and other infrastructure, says Prof. Colin Price, Head of the Department of Geophysics, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at Tel Aviv University. In an ongoing project to determine the impact of climate change on the world’s lightning and thunderstorm patterns, he and his colleagues have run computer climate models and studied real-life examples of climate change, such as the El Nino cycle in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, to determine how changing weather conditions impact storms.
An increase in lightning activity will have particular impact in areas that become warmer and drier as global warming progresses, including the Mediterranean and the Southern United States, according to the 2007 United Nations report on climate change. This research has been reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research and Atmospheric Research, and has been presented at the International Conference on Lightning Protection.
When running their state-of-the-art computer models, Prof. Price and his fellow researchers assess climate conditions in a variety of real environments. First, the models are run with current atmospheric conditions to see how accurately they are able to depict the frequency and severity of thunderstorms and lightning in today’s environment. Then, the researchers input changes to the model atmosphere, including the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (a major cause of global warming) to see how storms are impacted....
Lightning strike in Saitama, Japan, shot by masaki ikeda, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
No comments:
Post a Comment