Florida residents are well-aware of just how common lightning is here in the Sunshine State. Florida consistently leads U.S. states for lightning, especially when measured by lightning strike density.
The Sunshine State’s reputation as the “Lightning Capital of the U.S.” stems primarily from the incredibly high strike density, not total volume, because Florida is geographically smaller than states like Texas. But overall, Florida’s frequent storms and dense lightning frequency make it more dangerous. Some coastal and central Florida areas saw more than 1,200 strikes per square mile in 2022—more lightning activity than anywhere else in the country.
Lightning comes in different varieties, the most common kinds don't reach the ground, called intra-cloud and cloud-to-cloud. Cloud to ground lightning actually only makes up about 10-20% of strikes. About 1% is ground to cloud. Then one of the outlier forms of lightning stretches for miles (sometimes dozens of miles) horizontally and can resemble a spider web, and that’s why it’s called spider lightning.
We learn about ongoing research at Florida Gulf Coast University into this form of lightning with the instructor who is leading it and a student who helped her work with the data.
You can read the story WGCU produced about Dr. Watanabe's research on spider lightning here.
Guests:
Dr. Naomi Watanabe is an Instructor of Physics in the Department of Chemistry and Physics at Florida Gulf Coast University
Sam Halperin was an FGCU student until a few months ago, he has been assisting Dr. Watanabe with her spider lightning research
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