WASHINGTON — Lightning and tornadoes can strike fear into the hearts of Americans, but they don’t strike everywhere equally. New analyses presented April 15 at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers find that some parts of the country are more disaster-prone than they’re commonly given credit for, while others get off easier than previously thought.
Big cloud-to-ground strikes might be expected to be most common in urban areas, for example, where large buildings could draw lightning, said Heather Sheffield of the University of Maryland in College Park. Huge skyscrapers such as the Empire State Building in New York City act as “big lightning rods,” she says.
To test that idea, Sheffield analyzed summer strike patterns from 2004 to 2008 for Maryland — a diverse state in terms of terrain. Sheffield mapped lightning flash data from the National Lightning and Detection Network over forests, cities, woody wetlands and crop regions.