There was almost twice as much lightning north of 80 degrees in 2021 as in the previous nine years combined, a Finnish firm says.
Lightning struck in Iqaluit during a storm on Sunday. Terri Lang, Environment and Climate Change Canada’s meteorologist for Nunavut, said the department's weather system did not pick up how many times lightning struck, but that it did occur in the region.
Thunderstorms in Northern Alaska over sea ice on Monday sparked rare lightning strikes. The Washington Post reported lightning strikes occurred north of Prudhoe Bay, directly over sea ice, a rare phenomena that occurs once or twice a decade.
On Tuesday night, the state of Alaska saw thousands of lightning strikes. “Most of the 3,800 lightning strikes were concentrated in the Northwest Arctic,” said BLM Alaska Fire Service spokeswoman Beth Ipsen. There are several communities in close proximity to new fires.
In a single decade, summer lightning tripled across the Arctic, a change directly attributed to rapid Arctic warming, a new scientific paper reports. “Now that we have Arctic warming, you can really get a lot more of the optimal conditions for thunderstorms,” said Robert Holzworth, a University of Washington professor emeritus of Earth and space
Several trains have been delayed and canceled due to the storm.
Alaska Airlines said flights 64 and 65 had lightning strikes from storms that moved through the northern Panhandle and also knocked out power in Juneau.
Records show there were 18 years without any days of thunderstorms in Anchorage. The average is about 1.4 days of thunderstorms a year. This year there have already been four, and more over the Chugach.
More than 300 wild reindeer have been killed by lightning in central Norway.
Observations From Members 