It took peering inside a million clouds to figure out why there is so much more lightning over land than over oceans. It’s all to do with the amount of ice in the thunderclouds.
Atmospheric scientists believe lightning is a result of charge transfer between ice crystals in clouds. When recent studies showed that thunderstorms over land produce about 10 times as many flashes as those over oceans, some began to wonder if the mechanism in fact differed depending on the storm’s location. To find out, Walt Petersen’s team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville analysed data from NASA’s…
