Franklin France Latam Training for Qualifoudre with LiRi Campus.

Several of our partners from the LATAM area participated in our QUALIFOUDRE Level 1 & Level 2 SESSION, A big thank you to Dr Sylvain Fauveaux from LIRI CAMPUS who led this session.

All passed the exam with great success!

Congratulations to all and good luck in the lightning protection business with us in your country.

Lightning protection systems design requires a perfect understanding of lightning phenomenology and its occurrence depending on seasons and regions. Lightning maps are instrumental to assess the lightning risks for a structure or persons: obviously, risks increase with higher lightning frequency.

Lightning map are a key data. The “keraunic level” was initially referred to. It is measured by the number of days per year the lightning has been heard. This first measurement methodology lacks both precision and reliability.

With the meteo satellites era, it has been replaced by the “lightning density” (number of discharges/year/km²). “One of the first global maps of lightning activity was published in 2001 with data from the Optical Transient Detector (OTD) on the commercial OrbView-1 satellite and the Lightning Image Sensor (LIS) on NASA’s TRMM satellite. Two decades later, a second LIS mounted on the International Space Station (ISS) is adding to long-term records and making newer, better maps of global lightning activity.

The map above draws on observations from multiple sensors—the ISS LIS, the TRMM LIS, and OTD. The TRMM LIS collected data between 1997 and 2015; OTD was operational between 1995 and 2000; and ISS LIS has been flying since 2017. Scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Alabama-Huntsville published an updated map in March 2021. Researchers from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center released a similar map of lightning activity, based on three years of ISS LIS observations, in July 2020.”

This new map introduces two major changes:

• A much accurate measurement of the lightning activity in northern and southern regions
• A global view of lightning activity since it takes into account also the inter and intra clouds discharges.

The brightest areas are the most lightning prone spots worldwide : Central Africa (the Great Lakes regions), America with the Maracaibo lake that remains the most lightning struck place in the world and South East Asia (Malacca Strait)

Source : NASA Earth Observatory 

It is commonly accepted that lightning strikes structures due to their relative height : high rise buildings, trees, isolated farms, telecom or power lines towers etc… This phenomenon is well-known: the concentration of electric charges at the edge of the structures is named the “corona effect” and it can trigger a lightning bolt.

On the contrary, individuals lightning risks are under estimated by a majority of engineers and installers, because it is considered that a person is “protected” by surrounding structures its vicinity (buildings, towers, trees etc…) Unfortunately, it exists. It is limited statistically to one case over a million but it is still a risk and it can be lethal.

The technology exists : Early Streamer Emission lightning conductors provide a larger protection radius for the structure and its surroundings. As an example, the installation of an ESE lightning rod on this construction would have protected the employee outdoor, when he crossed the courtyard. A drama would have been avoided. Very luckily, this person has been fastly taken care of by his colleagues and medical services and he is safe with no injury. Still, the CCTV footage remains scary !

Lightning activity does not spread equally over the globe. Equatorial and tropical regions are highly subjected to lightning. High temperature and very high level of humidity are creating frequent convective phenomenon, ending into thunderstorms.

Most lightning prone areas in the world are Central and South America, Central Africa and South East Asia.

Continental climate areas are facing lightning phenomenon mainly during the hot and humid season (summer).

Lastly, the northern areas represent a very minor share of worldwide lightning activity: it accounts for a mere 0.2% in 2010 according to the World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN) data.

Still, in an article recently published by the Geophysical Research Letter (March 2021), scientists mention a 800% increase from 2010 to 2020 !

The explanations seem to be directly related to global warming: temperature rise, ice and permafrost melting… that induces conditions favorable to convective phenomenon and thunderstorms.

Following this new paper conclusions, if the increasing risk of lightning is not taken into account, local populations and northern sea traffic might become exposed and vulnerable to the phenomenon.

Source : https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020GL091366

In 2019, a record number of lightning discharges was recorded in Europe, in correlation with climate global warming. Unfortunately, lightning was back on the headlines again in 2020, in California during the month of August 2020 and in Australia in Nov – Dec 2020: in both cases, massive thunderstorms ignited destructive bush and forest wildfires. In less than 72 hours in California, more than 12 000 lightning discharges were recorded, triggering 650 wildfires in Norther California. These fires burned between 1,500,000 acres (6,100 km2) to 2,100,000 acres (8,500 km2) within a 2–3 week period.

A World Meteorological Organization (WMO) committee of experts has established in 2020 two new world records for the longest reported distance and the longest reported duration for a single lightning flash in, respectively, Brazil and Argentina.

• The world’s greatest extent for a single lightning flash is a single flash that covered a horizontal distance of 709 ± 8 km (440.6 ± 5 mi) across parts of southern Brazil on 31 October 2018.   This is equivalent to the distance between Boston and Washington DC in the United States of America or between London and the border of Switzerland near Basel.
• The greatest duration for a single lightning flash is 16.73 seconds from a flash that developed continuously over northern Argentina on 4 March 2019.

Researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama have published a new research in Global Change Biology. They estimate that more than 100 million lighting strikes on land each year will radically alter forests and other ecosystems in the region between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. Researchers estimated that lightning damages approximately 832 million tropical trees each year. Roughly a quarter of the trees probably die from their injuries. “This is the best evidence to date that lightning is a major disturbance influencing tropical forest dynamics and structure,” said STRI staff scientist and study co-author Helene Muller-Landau, “We suspect that our study vastly underestimates the total effect of lightning. Lightning strikes may play a major role in forest biomass/carbon cycling not only in tropical forests but also in other tropical ecosystems.”

Lastly, in Nov 2002, Arianespace unfortunately failed to launch Taranis satellite. Named after the French Gaulle lightning god, the satellite has been developed by the CNES (French Space Research Center) to study the electric phenomenon in the higher atmosphere and its relationships with thunderstorms.