I was browsing Twitter/X to see American Geophysical Union scientific talks (AGU23 just ended last week, in San Francisco with 27,000 scientists attending) and I came across the following neat topic:
Press: https://eos.org/articles/ocean-vessels-may-trigger-lightning-strikes
Open-Source Paper: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023EA002926
Amazingly:
Lightning is 15× more likely to occur at a ship location compared to 2 km away.
Lightning is 66× more likely to occur at a ship location compared to 25 km away.
Some ships seem to attract huge numbers of lightning strikes compared to others. For example:
“The vessel with the most lightning encounters was the Shelby Courtney, which operates around Gulf Coast Louisiana and was within 2 km of 449 WWLLN strokes during the 3-year period. The second vessel by stroke count is the 187 m cargo ship Bahama Spirit with 444 close lightning encounters. Cargo and tanker ships account for 5 of the top 25 vessels in Table 1, while there are also 3 tugs, 1 dredger, and 1 fishing boat. There are no pleasure craft or sailing ships in Table 1, but the top 25 ships by close lightning encounters do include 3 cruise ships: the Disney Dream with 413 strokes, the Disney Fantasy with 290 strokes, and the Carnival Pride with 270 strokes. The variety of vessel sizes and categories in Table 1 suggests that the amount of time spent sailing in lightning-prone regions is the primary driver of close lightning encounters. All of these vessels spent hundreds of days at sea over the 3-year period, and the hundreds of WWLLN matches only account for less than 0.3% of the AIS data generated by each vessel.”
Cool website in lightning strikes around the planet:
World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN):
https://wwlln.net/
Global Ship Tracking website:
https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-12.0/centery:25.0/zoom:4
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by paulhenrybeckwith
1 comment
woah very trippy